Literally being able to see and hear the child’s perspective will revise our understanding of early childhood development.

We will soon know more about early childhood development because we can at last see the world directly through the eyes of young children themselves.  This extraordinary opportunity will help us to think afresh about language acquisition, learning, play and the roles that parents and teachers should provide.

Technology will allow us to move beyond the types of evidence that typically underpin  knowledge about early childhood development, such as observation and reporting of young children’s behaviour, usually  by mothers, researchers and teachers.  A camera strapped to a toddler’s head can now tell its own story.

The ethical question of a child’s informed consent in such circumstances may be challenging. But it’s not insurmountable, and research using these techniques has already taken place.

Changing conventional views of early childhood development

Audiovisual technology is already justifying a critical review of some conventional wisdom. Tracking the eye movements of young children has been possible since the 1960s, but today the technology has been miniaturized and is much easier to use. Tests are demonstrating that toddlers’ inattention can be strategic: it frequently reflects their swift assessment of whether they already know the thing they are observing and, if not, whether it’s cognitively within their developmental reach. Celeste Kidd finds that this strategy is rational and efficient, preventing young children from wasting time on stimuli that offer them limited learning opportunities.

Likewise, as Catherine Tamis-LeMonda shows, such technologies can better describe the realities of young children’s play in highly resourced societies – flitting among as many as 100 objects in an hour – than traditional research approaches which might place a mother and her child alongside a limited number of toys, with a researcher observing their interactions.

Using technology to see the world through children’s eyes is rehabilitating the concept of exploratory learning. Kidd’s research highlights that the apparent distractibility of many young children is, in fact, a mark of their efficiency as learners. Meanwhile, following the child in what Tamis-LeMonda calls ‘foraging’ behaviour also helps to identify multiple opportunities for parents to boost language development by naming what these busy children see, touch, smell, taste and explore.

Technology’s insights into early childhood development at home

We may be just beginning to improve our understanding of early childhood development, particularly when it comes to how homes operate during the early years. Technology should help to show more clearly how children interact with parents, siblings and others in the home; how children are directed in their day-to-day lives; and how much freedom they have to explore as they wish. The childs’-eye view may reveal patterns of play and language that go unnoticed by busy adults.

“This extraordinary opportunity will help us to think afresh about language acquisition, learning, play and the roles that parents and teachers should provide in support early childhood development.”

Getting an accurate picture of such things through parental reporting can be difficult, because parents’ reports may be unreliable. Likewise, observations by researchers may be tainted by the fact that their very presence alters home dynamics. With newer technologies, young children can testify for themselves.

Another characteristic of these technologies is their capacity to generate much more and more varied data than we’ve had in the past, thereby helping to redress past imbalances. Early childhood development researchers should be better able to study linguistic minority and minority ethnic families, extended families, children’s relationships with their fathers, and diverse forms of child-rearing—particularly as recording devices become ever smaller, so that they become less obtrusive and disruptive.

Risks of existing research approaches

The current imbalance in research may have led, in some instances, to pathologising and problematizing disadvantaged, Black, Asian and Hispanic families, when the real issue may be inadequate understanding of these families, based on insufficient data.

Technologies that view the home through children’s eyes – and which allow data to be collected more cheaply than through direct observation – might help to address such inadequacies in the study of early childhood development.

They might build on earlier evidence developed by Gordon Wells in the UK and Shirley Brice-Heath in the US. Their findings suggest that children from less well-off families use a much wider, richer range of language at home than they do at school, where they are less culturally confident than some of their better-off peers. It would be good to revisit such observations using more modern tools. Technology could, for example, provide insights into the highly contested claim that in high-poverty households, children are exposed to an average of 30 million fewer words in their early years than their middle-income peers.

Insights into multiple models of early childhood development

We know much more about what goes on in white families than in families of other ethnicities, and we know much less about early childhood development outside Europe and the United States. As Jaipaul Roopnarine demonstrates, there are multiple routes to maturity, and we need to understand them all to optimise early childhood development. Without a more thorough understanding, research may advocate models based only on Western evidence, treating them as universally applicable when alternative models from other cultures might be equally or even more effective.

The value of seeing the world through new eyes is very apparent. Footage on YouTube of domestic cats roaming around with cameras strapped to their bodies is captivating, mapping where cats go, what they see and what they do.  Likewise, wildlife programmes have been re-energised by similar methods that capture birds’-eye views of the skies and the land.

Audiovisual technologies hold out the prospect that young children, as unconscious recorders of their own behaviour and of those around them, can shed light on how they are agents of their own early development and what works best for them. The evidence collected may also prove to be just as entertaining.

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Support conversational capacities among parents on low incomes for language development in children that can cut poverty’s impact.

Big improvements seem possible for crucial language development in children from families in underserved communities. These possibilities do not negate the need for economic policies to address child poverty. But children’s language prospects need not be so blighted by impoverished beginnings. They can do well despite stubborn child poverty or poor preparation for school.

It’s all about the power of talk. Conversation between parents and young children aids language development in children and can nurture young children’s learning and redress some of the imbalances with better-off peers. Talking can help put impoverished children on a path to school readiness and success.

These interactions can occur anywhere – around a book, in a shop, just hanging out. And they are increasingly taking place. New locations are being developed for them.  There are simple, inexpensive ways to encourage and enrich language development in children at home and out of doors.

A big question is whether policy will provide the support that such conversations need when children are out and about or at home. Will it also offer the encouragement needed for fathers to make the most of their own important chats with their children?

Poverty’s challenge to language development in children

The challenge was laid out in 1995 in an oft-cited but contested US study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley. The study found that in high-poverty households, children were, on average, exposed to 30 million fewer words in their early years, compared with their middle income peers. This ‘30 million word gap’ was said to underpin slower language development in children that diminished later access to curriculum and lower long-term achievement.

“Conversation breakthroughs are occurring in economically disadvantaged families … that have helped narrow gaps in maths and language development in children.”

This is a much disputed piece of work, not least because it involved a small sample. Further studies have disputed the evidence. Most recently, research in similar communities by Douglas E Sperry and colleagues failed to support the claims. Their findings suggested that if the definition of a child’s verbal environment excludes multiple caregivers and bystander talk, researchers will underestimate the number of words to which low-income children are exposed. They show that multiple sources can support children’s language development.

Nevertheless, it is clear that talk is a powerful pathway for skill development. And children don’t get much of this kind of language development support in the classroom. On average, vocabulary instruction typically accounts for just five minutes of the classroom day. Teachers do most of the talking in schools, much of it directive, often leaving little room for student dialogue.

So home is also vital. The language children experience at home provides a pivotal foundation for learning and language development, according to Annemarie Hindman and colleagues. In his seminal study The Meaning Makers, Gordon Wells found that input from parents harnesses the extended time they have for one-to-one interaction.

Catherine Tamis-LeMonda highlights the armoury of skills that parents have to help children with language development. She explains how parental inputs are special thanks to the reinforcement they provide by actions such as smiling, singing, speaking and gesturing in turn.

Changing interactions amid child poverty to support language development in children

Most intriguing are changes recorded in economically disadvantaged families. There’s been a dramatic shift in the United States in how parents with few resources care for and engage with their children. While child development policy in the US has largely focused on extending access to preschool, low-income parents have been busy transforming their practice, according to Jane Waldfogel. That’s been helping to narrow gaps between lower- and higher-income children in maths, reading and language development.

New locations are also emerging for conversation breakthroughs. These are highlighted by the US Learning Landscapes programmes that redesign public spaces for learning through play and conversation.  Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and colleagues show that these innovations prompt enhanced interactions that support language development in children, particularly in low-income families.

“While we await economic justice and better investment in educational institutions, we should make the most of parental talk to aid language development in children and limit the damage that poverty exacts.”

So what can policy makers do to build on these findings? First, they should tell the story of the difference that parents can make to language development in their children. Simon Calmar Andersen’s research in Denmark highlights the importance of instilling in parents a belief in their children’s capacities and their potential to make a difference. Andersen’s research shows how it’s possible to transform parental mind-sets that underestimate children, leading to big improvements in children’s reading.

Low-income fathers are one group of parents who can make a big difference to language development and learning in children, but they often lack confidence. Natasha Cabrera emphasises how dads’ play and conversation, in supporting social and cognitive development, offers families ways to break the links between childhood poverty and impoverished education and learning. But dads need to know, she says, that they have an influence that no one else may be able to duplicate.

Increasing confidence to talk amid child poverty

All staff and services that come into contact with parents should prioritise bolstering the confidence of underserved parents around the transformational possibilities of conversation with their children. Such encouragement for language development in children should begin with prenatal services.

We must also make the most of public spaces to energise and support children’s interactions with parents and other adults. Public space – free, available to all, and increasingly stimulating – should be recruited as a major ally in the battle against educational inequity.

New pathways are emerging for low-income families to improve children’s educational prospects. As we await economic justice and better investment in educational institutions, we should make the most of parental talk to limit the damage that poverty exacts on children’s language development and possibilities.

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Education’s increasingly narrow focus on tests and targets overlooks play’s harder-to-measure contributions to child development.

Policy makers should stick with play as an educational priority even though the importance of play in child development is sometimes hard to measure and, hence, difficult to defend.

They shouldn’t be seduced by increasingly narrow approaches that threaten to diminish the importance of play in child development. An overreliance on high-stakes testing sometimes fails to recognise the potential of play’s sometimes mysterious but obviously vital role.

There are three reasons – some barely appreciated – for emphasising play in child development. First, play can unlock children’s diverse ways of learning. Second, it helps develop learning outside the classroom. Third, play may have an important role in reducing crime.

Learning through play highlights different pathways to child development

Children, through their many forms of play, mark out alternative paths to learning and, hence, child development. The diversity of ways to learn is clear from the wide cultural variations in early play. ‘One size does not fit all’ is play’s message to learning. There is no universal theory of child development, demonstrates Jaipaul Roopnarine, one of the seven leading play researchers who have contributed to the Child and Family Blog. Roopnarine contrasts, for example, the highly involved play practices of ‘helicopter parents’ and ‘tiger moms’ in some societies with the attitudes of Mayan mothers in Guatemala who see play as perfunctory to childhood development.

Individual children take different play paths, guiding their learning through play that is most appropriate to their capacities and potential. They cleverly avoid what they already know or might find too difficult to understand, demonstrates Celeste Kidd. Her fascinating eye-tracking studies with babies show how smart they can be in their seeming distraction. Their play patterns provide vital information about what children already know or can easily learn.

“Don’t be seduced by approaches that threaten to diminish the importance of learning through play.”

On the other hand, there remains considerable uncertainty about the precise value of certain forms of play, following Angeline Lillard’s debunking of contemporary beliefs that extra pretend play builds cognitive skills and creativity. Lillard could find no reliable evidence for this common belief. Her findings suggest when learning through play is rooted in real life, it is more beneficial to child development than, for example, play with toys.

Yet Lillard’s findings don’t mean that childhood imaginative play should be condemned to irrelevance. Imaginative play is everywhere, a marker of humanity, and it goes on throughout life, as Paul Harris points out. It clearly remains important, he says, despite our incomplete understanding of its mechanisms.

Learning through play occurs outside school

Amid debate about the importance of play in child development during early years’ education, many have remarked on its disappearance from public spaces. That loss is being addressed in exciting new ways. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff show, in their work, how developing supports for outdoor play – on sidewalks, supermarkets, even bus-stops – can create innovative opportunities for learning.

Indeed, schools would be wise to pay attention to this exemplar of learning through play that is emerging out in the streets. Early evidence suggests that the playful learning being developed in the Learning Landscapes projects may hold great potential, in particular, for tackling educational inequities.

“Be wary of relegating learning through play any further from formal educational settings.”

Fathers – and their forms of play – are also allies in challenging such social injustice, finds Natasha Cabrera. Her work has established that play with dad can help bridge cognitive, social and emotional learning gaps between low-income children and their better-off peers. Cabrera points out that low-income dads are often extremely good at the challenging wh-question communications which so benefit children’s cognitive development. They can also be very good at the rough-and-tumble play that supports children’s social and emotional learning.

Play is correlated with reduced crime

 There is a powerful criminal justice argument for promoting childhood play. Specifically, deprivation of play in childhood is correlated with later convictions for violent, antisocial activities. According to Stuart Brown, murderers typically have no memory of ‘normal’ childhood play. “Bullying and inappropriately acted out aggression were their ‘play’ patterns,” Brown explains in his reflections from a career that has examined 6,000 individual play histories.

Taken together, these experts’ contributions create compelling perspectives on the importance of play in child development. At a very basic level, play can encourage children to stay in education. Educators often comment that creative play – particularly through arts subjects – can support regular school attendance, especially among disadvantaged children, who may be particularly prone to feeling alienated by dry over-concentration on core curriculum subjects.

Be wary, then, of tests and targets that threaten to push learning through play any further from formal education. The rigidity of these institutional environments may sometimes result in the very opposite of what they set out to achieve.

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Coping with family conflict and adversity creates major challenges for mothers and fathers.

When my children were younger, we’d read a picture book about Jenny and her growing bag of worries. It followed her everywhere until she was totally weighed down and could barely walk. Finally, Jenny confided in a kindly adult, who slowly unpacked the huge bag, one worry at a time.

Some worries disappeared upon being exposed to the light. It turned out that some did not belong to Jenny at all, but, instead, to other people. And some needed sorting out right away. In the story, Jenny’s tears turn to smiles as her burdens melt away. At last she can enjoy being a child.

Virginia Ironside’s ‘The Huge Bag of Worries’ is akin to the family conflict and stress that can often burden and debilitate parents, making it hard for them to provide the best environment for child development. These are not just conflicts with former and current partners. They include difficulties with their children. Much family conflict and stress is also rooted in the demands of jobs and in outside pressures such as poverty and racism.

The capacity to manage, and sometimes set aside, family conflict and stress seems to lie at the heart of parenting for successful child development, according to findings highlighted by our expert researchers in the Child and Family Blog.

Many solutions lie beyond individual parents: policy makers, service providers, schools and business bear considerable responsibility for adapting work, creating supports, developing education and reducing poverty in ways that can lessen family conflict and stress. But individual mothers and fathers can do much to lighten the bag of family conflict and stress that undermines child development.

Susan Golombok sums up the challenges. First, she demonstrates that family type – be it the traditional family with two heterosexual parents or a ‘new family form’ with a single parent or same-sex parents – has little bearing per se on children’s outcomes.

“What matters is how well parents avoid, manage and resolve multiple potential stresses and family conflicts so they can maintain high quality love and care.”

Then, Golombok focusses on what does matter: family processes, namely ‘the quality of relationships in the family, such as warmth, levels of interaction, openness of communication and methods of discipline’. In essence, Golombok is talking about how well parents avoid, manage and resolve stress and family conflict to maintain the high-quality love and care needed for robust child development.

On relationships with children, our experts could not be clearer. Whatever else is achieved by spanking or smacking children, it doesn’t make them ‘nicer’, Elizabeth Gershoff and colleagues find. It has no impact on the positive qualities that most parents value in children, such as friendliness, openness, kindness, sympathy and understanding of others. By contrast, hugging and warmth do improve young children’s behaviour.

In a similar vein, Ross Thompson details how parents and caregivers who show kindness, and who talk to toddlers about emotions, tend to help young children become caring people. When emotional landscapes are explained to young children, they act in helpful, kind and considerate – that is, “prosocial” – ways, Thompson concludes.

These can be tough models to follow for any parent who is stressed. It is even tougher, perhaps, to manage family conflict with a child’s second parent. But once again, the advice from research is clear.

Phillip Cowan and Carolyn Pape Cowan, along with many other researchers, show that unresolved family conflict – whether between intact or separated parental couples – is an important risk factor for child development.

“The enduring capacities of parents to be kind to their children, mend family conflict, and moderate the stresses imposed by an often impoverishing world offer great hope for child development.”

If parents collaborate effectively and don’t undermine each other’s parenting, children do better – socially, emotionally, behaviourally and academically. They can forget about their parents and feel free to explore their own worlds and learn new things. If parents don’t achieve this equilibrium, then children can become anxious or fearful and find it difficult to concentrate on learning.

Tied in with this is fathers’ positive involvement in their children’s lives. Fathers’ absence is often both a marker and a casualty of unresolved stress and family conflict. As many of our contributors find, children often pay a high price for this loss.

What about poverty, another particularly great source of family stress? We know that young children from disadvantaged backgrounds can fall behind their peers in language and learning, even as early as age three. In classrooms, they often have difficulty focusing their attention, thinking, and managing their emotions.

Poverty has powerful effects on child development, which can even be identified biologically. But the good news from neuroscientists is that these impacts are not hard-wired or inevitable. Parents can and do make a huge difference in moderating and managing the stress of poverty to reduce the risk to child development.

Researchers such as Michael Meaney are showing that warm, supportive relationships can, for example, reduce the stress hormones that are released in adversity and can even reverse the behavioural and other effects of hormone overload.

Parents, particularly those who are disadvantaged, must not simply be set adrift to manage the daunting pressure and stress that they face in raising children. However, it is also important to recognise that they have considerable enduring capacity to be kind to their children, mend family conflict, and moderate the stress and difficulty imposed by poverty and other hardships. These skills in managing adversity that already exist in many families offer great hope for child development.

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Governments struggle to support positive, engaged fatherhood. Macroeconomics and political science might help explain what’s delaying policy reform. 

Fatherhood is central to raising children well. That’s an overwhelming message from half a dozen of the world’s leading researchers who have contributed to the Child and Family Blog.

There is compelling evidence that positive, engaged fatherhood walks hand in hand with good child development. Indeed, we’ve known for over 30 years that positive fatherhood in the early years is one of the best predictors of a child’s later success, explains Charlie Lewis.

Barriers to fatherhood

Yet almost everywhere, fathers face high, stubborn barriers to looking after their children – at work, in public services, in law, and at home. The media often paints them as incompetent, absent and largely irrelevant at best. Governments offer little support to caring fatherhood.

Most worrying, the barriers are highest for dads on low incomes – those whose positive involvement can make most difference to their children’s development. These men can offer help to children that they may find nowhere else.

“The institutional barriers to fatherhood remain. They represent a substantial malfunctioning of child development policy.”

Low-income dads can stretch their children linguistically, asking ‘who, why, where, what’ questions, finds Natasha Cabrera’s research. Their rough and tumble play helps children to learn to read emotions and regulate their behaviours. Fatherhood can be vital for narrowing the gap between their children’s school readiness and that of better-off peers.

Child development policy fails low income fathers

Yet precisely these low-income fathers receive the least support in raising their young. They miss out on leave benefits that don’t apply to the casualised work of the poorly paid. Likewise, these benefits may be unavailable to struggling non-citizens, explains Philip Hwang, and low-income dads are often marginalised by public services.

Mothers on welfare are financially penalised if they cohabit with their child’s father, notes Ross Parke. The state’s message to the impoverished dad seems to be: ‘If you can’t pay, then don’t stay.’ In the long run, that can mean he’s not involved with his kids.

Meanwhile, policy largely ignores lessons from Nordic countries about the success of lengthy ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ leave arrangements for dads, as Margaret O’Brien details. And so the institutional barriers to fatherhood remain, suggesting a substantial malfunctioning of child development policy. ‘Policy should be brought into line with what we know and what we say,’ argues Michael Lamb.

Support for motherhood seems easier than support for fatherhood

It’s intriguing that these same governments seem able to design policies that support motherhood, such as leave and childcare packages for mothers staying in, and returning to, the work force. What explains their persistent failure to support positive, engaged fatherhood? What’s stopping governments from implementing change that experts recognise as good for children?

It’s a question that child development research should answer. But perhaps the skill base examining fatherhood issues – and possibly other child development questions – is too narrow. That’s because the solutions for implementing fatherhood policies may sit less in, for example, developmental psychology than in fields not usually associated with child development: political science and economics.

“Political scientists could explain the dynamics of political systems – in Nordic countries – which have been early adopters of enlightened fatherhood policies.”

There are plenty of behavioural economists looking at child development. Janet Currie at Princeton University, for example, has tested the cost effectiveness of cutting local pollution levels to improve children’s learning. Greg Duncan is testing whether children’s cognitive and behavioural development in disadvantaged families is improved by cutting poverty – giving their parents an extra $4,000 a year for the first 40 months.

Apply broader disciplines to child development research

But macroeconomics tends to stay clear of fatherhood. Political scientists are also rarely present in the research debate. But their insights might bridge the gulf between existing child development evidence and more widespread adoption of policies supporting positive fatherhood.

Without their research, one is left to speculate about what’s going wrong. It may be that governments see policies that support positive fatherhood as at odds with a key goal: keeping their economies well-supplied with affordable workers. This goal may be good for families, providing vital income. It’s also consistent with policies designed for mothers that increase their participation in the job market. But backing engaged fatherhood is more problematic.

When fathers identify more as carers, they may shift from their traditional focus as workers. They may, then, prefer to work less, behaving more like mothers, for whom wage labour competes with the rewards of engaged parent-child relationships. In economic terms, increased caring fatherhood could be seen as equivalent in impact to a constraint on the labour supply.

In short, governments, driven by strategies for high employment, may have little incentive to support policies that shift fathers’ focus closer to home. It might even be said that most dads are exactly where most governments want them to be – at work. And if they’re not, the main option that policy typically gives them is to look for work.

This is why we need to learn more from macroeconomics about the wider and longer-term economic gains and losses that spring from supporting caring fatherhood. Insights from political scientists are also required to explain the dynamics of the Nordic countries’ political systems which have been early adopters of enlightened fatherhood policies.

We need to understand what’s inspiring them and what’s holding up the rest of the world. Optimising child development demands a more thorough understanding of what might encourage governments to implement father-friendly policies.

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Research shows low-cost, effective way for teenagers to run campaigns against bullying.

Socially influential pupils can dramatically cut teenage school conflict and bullying by working together to identify and spread solutions together, according to a study of of over 24,000 students in 56 US ‘middle’ schools for children ages 11-14.

Groups of just 20-32 students, when they included five or six of a school’s more influential young people, reduced disciplinary episodes by 60%. These groups of students designed and ran an anti-conflict campaign at their school, modelling and speaking about the changes that they identified as important. They were operating in schools that averaged 800 pupils, ages 11 to 14.

The study was led by Betsy Levy Paluck, Professor of Psychology and Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. It shows that conflict, which is sometimes considered to be inevitable in schools, is in fact highly mutable, provided young people are at the heart of working out social rules, modeling them and persuading others to follow them. Groups of students, particularly when they include influential figures, can significantly influence how their peers behave and help make schools more harmonious.

“Our findings,” says Professor Levy Paluck, “offer a low-cost, effective way to reduce conflict, which includes behaviors like spreading rumors, sexual harassment, physical fighting, and bullying. Alternative anti-bullying strategies, which often have a more top-down approach, sometimes have questionable value because, often, they are poorly evaluated.”

Identify key, socially influential students

The Princeton team identified socially influential students by asking pupils to name 10 young people in their school who they chose to hang out with, either face-to-face or online. Using their responses, the researchers built a social network profile of the school.

This network was a diverse selection of influential students, not just the “cool kids.” Some, for example, belonged to the school band or were in the math club, and they mattered to a particular subset of students. Some were highly involved with conflict—not the type that teachers typically select for anti-bullying campaigns.

“Conflict, which is sometimes considered to be inevitable in schools, is in fact highly mutable, provided young people are at the heart of working out social rules, modeling them and persuading others to follow them.”

“Counter to conventional wisdom,”, explains Professor Levy Paluck, “such pupils can be extremely helpful to anti-conflict programs because they can speak authentically about the causes of conflict. Conflict can be sport for some, but it’s not usually enjoyable for anyone. So it was not difficult for even these pupils to identify sources of stress or unhappiness that they wanted to change at their school.”

Next, the team randomly selected groups of about 20-32 students in half of the 56 schools that tried our conflict reduction approach (it did not convene any activities in the control group of 28 schools). The researchers didn’t deliberately load any groups with socially influential students. Pupils were randomly assigned. But conflict was reduced more dramatically when a particular school’s program happened to involve more influential students.

“We never used the term “bullying” with our groups of students. When we assembled a group in a particular school, we asked them to discuss what made people unhappy or uncomfortable at school. The group would meet every second week to discuss those issues, with an adult from outside the school facilitating.”

It’s about more than just bullying

The students identified a wide range of issues, not just what is typically thought of as bullying. For example, many were worried about language they took to be hurtful, such as the use of “gay” to describe something bad. Social exclusion was also important – where, for example, only certain people were welcome in areas of the school such as tables in the cafeteria or in places where people congregate before class or where they sit on the school bus.

The social lines and invisible barriers that prevent young people from talking across friendship lines were often raised. After establishing trust within the groups, girls in particular were able to discuss harassment from boys and from other girls about their relationships with boys.

Groups came up with strategies to reduce conflict in their schools, explains Professor Levy Paluck: “So, for example, though showing respect was seen as a desirable quality across all schools, ways of expressing it differed. For example, in one school program, students said that you show respect for someone when you walk home with them from school. That worked well for that school.”

Some traditional anti-bullying programs seemed flawed in students’ eyes. Many programs advise students to be an ally or an active bystander when someone is bullied, to tell a teacher if something negative happens, or to intervene in conflicts. But the study found that active bystanders are often disliked by peers, as are those who tell the teachers.

Novel approaches to persuading peers

The groups generated lots of ideas on how to advertise their stance against conflict in school. These included, for example, making posters, starting petitions, beginning one-to-one discussions with people, wearing anti-conflict wristbands or using online strategies such as Instagram posts or conversations on Facebook.

“Those who ‘matter’ were not necessarily the ‘cool kids’. Some belonged to the school band or were in the math club. Some were highly involved with conflict—not the type that teachers typically select for anti-bullying campaigns.”

Studies of other anti-conflict programs have sometimes asked students to report how much their behavior has changed. As a more independent measurement, this study collected school records on who was brought to the office for disciplining because of conflict with another peer.

Over a single school year, the study recorded a 25% reduction in peer conflict reports in schools whose pupils tried the program. When at least 20% of a treatment school’s anti-conflict group was composed of socially influential students, reductions of 60% were achieved, compared with schools that didn’t develop a program. In total, during a single school year, in the 28 schools where the program was implemented, disciplinary events fell from 2,695 to 2,012 across the 11,938 students involved.

This research also saw the effect that socially influential students can have on values, such as racism, in one-to-one encounters with their peers. For example, in schools where our program was implemented, a pupil who hadn’t talked with a socially influential student typically agreed that only “a few” students disapproved of racial and ethnic jokes. In contrast, a student who had been exposed to an influential person typically agreed that “about 75%” of pupils disapproved.

The message to schools and policy makers, says Professor Ley Paluck “is that we have a low-cost, effective way to reduce conflict in schools.” The study shows that a relatively small number of students (less than 5 per cent) can be involved in developing a program tailored for their school that can be highly effective within a single year. The key to maximizing success, suggests the research, is including a good number of socially influential students who matter to their peers and who will be listened to, probably far more than any teacher.

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