Yours, mine, and ours: How do kids learn about ownership?

Two pairs of childish hands pull at the toy truck. “That’s my truck!” “No, that’s my truck!”

It passes between them several times before finally ending up in one child’s lap. The victor begins playing. The loser runs off to sob in their parent’s lap.

Watching the tussle, you may shake your head and think, “They just don’t know any better.”

But is that really the case?

UFV psychologist Madison Pesowski isn’t so sure.

“When you walk into a toddler’s room, and one kid's fighting another kid because he wants the toy, maybe it's not about a lack of understanding of ownership,” Pesowski said. Instead, she believes there may be limitations to how kids can act on their complex understanding of yours, mine, and ours.

“There was a meme going around about toddler property rules: if it's in my hand, it's mine. If I like it, it's mine. If I need it, it's also mine,” she said. “But … two-year-olds actually expect people to be upset when their property is taken by other people without permission or if it's lost, suggesting that they actually understand the consequences of what happens to owners when property rights are violated.”

Now, Pesowski is undertaking new research with kids in the Fraser Valley to figure out exactly how kids learn about property rules, and how sophisticated their understanding really is.

A deed to a house means you own it. A book in your bookshelf belongs to you.

In this way, ownership is simple, concrete: it contains structured rules with a clear connection between the object and the owner.

But how do we start to understand more complicated connections between people and the things they own?

When do we start to learn that the chocolate bar in the grocery store is not ours to take, even if it doesn’t belong to an explicit person? How does it become clear that the plate of strawberries in front of a sibling is theirs, while an identical plate of fruit from the same container is mine?

Those questions are part of Pesowski’s latest research project for her Kids in Developmental Science (KIDS) lab at UFV. She has spent most of her academic career studying the way children think about other people, and specifically how they use social cues to predict the way people will act. Pesowski has realized that much of the research that focuses on social cognition really boils down to how kids understand ownership—that ever-present element of modern life.

“Most of the research before I started my journey was keeping the social world and the physical world kind of separate,” she said. But, she said, kids’ understanding of their social lives is directly linked to their understanding of the physical world.

“I was trying to build that bridge and that connection,” she continued. “There was some work that was mostly asking how do kids reason about owned property? And then there was another camp asking how do kids make inferences and predictions about people?

“We need ownership in order to understand what people are doing or how they're going to react.”

Pesowski’s past research focused on whether kids use their understanding of people to predict how others would feel about objects. (For example, would someone who loves donuts be upset if someone else ate their frosting-coated pastry?)

Her new research at UFV, which has funding for the next four years, will examine the rules of ownership itself. Specifically, Pesowski hopes to discover if kids slowly learn the rules of ownership by watching the adults in their lives, or if they are making more sophisticated connections between property and people.

“Children receive mixed messages about ownership,” she said. When someone takes a toy from a kid, a parent will typically tell them that they should share their toys. But when that child takes a toy away from someone else, a parent will tell them to give them back. In the first case, sharing takes priority. In the second, it’s ownership that matters.

There are also questions around more abstract ideas of ownership. The rules may be clear when a toy is possessed by a sibling or friend. It becomes murky when the item in question belongs to a store, library, or public space.

Pesowski is already a year into her research and has begun two studies on children between the ages of two and eight in the Fraser Valley. (She has partnerships with several daycares and classrooms in the valley.) Some of her early research is backing up some of the theories she had about how kids might begin to think about ownership.

The kids typically think: “It's okay to look at somebody's property. It's okay to think about it, but it's definitely not okay to take it home,” she said. “That lines up with how adults think about it, which is pretty cool, because that means that three-year-olds are thinking in the same kinds of ways as university students are.”

Pesowski has two papers in the works on her team’s research so far, and hopes that more study will create not only academic breakthroughs, but also useful tools for parents and caregivers.

“If we can give them the tools or strategies to talk about these concepts, hopefully it will foster a more cohesive understanding in classrooms and in situations where they have to share resources,” she said.

And maybe it will help stop sibling spats over toy trucks as well—or at least give parents more tools to understand them.

Parents who have kids between the ages of two and eight, and want their children to participate in Pesowski’s research can sign up online.