Are you listening to me?

Communication with children between four and twelve years old

Martine F. Delfos

Dutch editions: 2001-1st / 2022 -22nd Luister je wel naar míj? Gespreksvoering met kinderen tussen vier en twaalf jaar. Amsterdam: Uitgeverrij SWP.

Spanish editions: 2001-1st. ¿Me escuchas? Como conversar con niños de cuatro a doce años. Bernard van Leer Foundation: The Hague; second edition: 2009-2nd ¿Me estás escuchando? Madrid: Pyramide.

German edition: 2004-1st – 2015-10th: Sag mir mal… Gesrächsführung mit kindern, 4-12 Jahre. Weinheim/Basel: Beltz report.

French 1st edition 2006 - 3rd edition 2007. De l’écoute au respect, communiquer avec les enfants. Conversations avec des enfants de quatre à douze ans. Ramonville Saint-Agne: Érès:

Czeck edition: 2018. Povez mi. Jak vést profesionální rozhovor s detmi mezi 4 a 12 lety. Prague: Portál.

Romanian edition: Asculti ma? Comunicarea cu copii de la 4 la 12 ani. 2023. Bucharest: APAR.

Information about other publications by Martine F. Delfos: www.mdelfos.nl

Are you listening to me?

Communicating with children from four to twelve years old

Martine F. Delfos

E-ISBN 978 90 8850 459 4

NUR 847

THEME JNE / VFXC

BISAC FAM034000 / SOC047000

First edition 2001 (ISBN 978 90 6665 366 5)

Second edition 2023

© 2023 Martine F. Delfos / SWP Publishers

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of SWP Publishers, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Lucas Quinten

For the child to be…

The most powerful weapon in empowering the child is adult modesty.

F. Delfos, lecture to the YMCW, Helsinki, 1999,

10th anniversary of the Children’s Rights from 1989.

Communication with children and adolescents

Are you listening to me? forms together with I also have something to say! (Not yet in English) a series of two books about communicating with children and young people. Each part focuses on the specific target group (part 1: 4 to 12; part 2: 13 to 25). The development during the period is described and the specific characteristics of conversation with children of different ages. There are many exercises that everyone can try themselves. It is suitable for training, but also proves to be a useful tool for parents in raising their children. Both books focus on the right attitude that is necessary for a good conversation with young people.

1 Introduction

Are you listening to me?

Are you listening to me!? Children have heard it so many times, a question often in a firm and stern tone by adults. But inside children often think: But are you listening to me?! And they are right. While children have a reputation for not listening to adults, the reverse is also true. Adults often do not listen to what children say either. However, the adult’s question is usually a request for obedience, the child’s a plea that his or her story be listened to.

The start of learning to communicate with children is in fact very simple: the attitude.

Everyone has been a child, and most people talk every day to children if not every week, nevertheless it is often difficult to really communicate with children.

There is hardly any literature on communicating with children, and certainly not with young children. Little or no scientific research has been done. What there is, focuses mainly on the difference in communication between adults and children. Little attention is paid to how adults and children talk to each other and how they can communicate based on their possibilities and impossibilities. In a review of research about listening to children, Clark (2005) states that little research has been done about interrogating children, but that what emerges from it, is that it is important to consider the difference when communicating with children, in their perspective, interests and needs at different ages. In the meantime, more and more attention has been paid to the child. The United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child is about ten years old at the beginning of the twenty-first century (CRC, 1989). Attention is increasingly focused on the child. Given the increasing interest in the opinion of the child, some research is beginning to emerge on how survey surveys involving questionnaires and interviews with children should be conducted (Borgers et al., 1999). Partly because of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, attention is being paid to the participation of children in scientific research. Punch (2002) shows that scientific research with children differs from that with adults and shows seven methodological bottlenecks. The main problem is that the view on children is an adults view rather than that of children themselves. The right of children to participate in scientific research is examined to fit by the requirements of the ethics committee that assesses whether research is not in any way harmful for children (Powell & Smith, 2009). Conroy and Harcourt (2009) discuss how sensitive it is of asking young children for permission to participate in research. For example, their consent may only cover the very near future and parents sometimes give consent where children themselves would not, or vice versa. It is necessary to adopt a child-centered perspective (Grover, 2004). The opportunity to participate in scientific research is not unrelated to the attitude towards children in general. Sinclair (2004) indicates that participation of children in scientific research is only possible when it is embedded in the relationship with children in general. In order to make it possible to have children participate in research, one must realize that children are aware when adults act on an equal footing with children. In everyday life, children experience the power relations between children and adults (Christensen, 2004).

Speaking with children is a daily activity for almost everyone, at least during part of his or her life. For professionals who work with children, it is even a core activity. Nevertheless, we often are taught little about it in training courses, and we have to draw our knowledge mainly from our own experience and that of the people around us. In books on developmental psychology, the attention given to it is limited; in favorable cases, a page or two at the most. Specific attention to open conversations with children – the central subject of this book – is even scarcer. Most of the research is about communicating with children in interrogation situations and for testimonies.

1.1 The dominance of language

The younger the child, the more awkward adults seem to feel when talking to children (exercise 1.1, appendix 1). Especially when it comes to difficult or painful subjects. This is no less true for the child. The younger the child, the stranger communication with adults is often for him or her. It starts from birth. Babies are not born with language, but they are born with the possibility of language (Chomsky, 1957; Kegl et a., 1999). Soon a baby realizes that an adult does not understand enough if it is not expressed in words. Without this being explained, the baby understands that he or she will have to learn what the jumble of sounds that adults produce means, and the baby tries to teach itself a language. A baby even knows how to make an abstraction of different sounds that belong to the same sound system but are pronounced by different people. Groups of sounds such as ‘eating’ or ‘outside’ spoken by several people in different voices are recognized as the same concept. The baby knows from this, completely independently with only light encouragement from children and adults around the baby and without being given rules, to develop a vocabulary, a wealth of meaning and a grammar. If it hears different kinds of sounds, it will group them as separate languages, ‘eat’ and ‘outside’ together and ‘manger’ and ‘dehors’ in another group. For example, in this example the child unconsciously makes ‘Dutch’ and ‘French’. When a child is taught several languages, two or even three, in principle it will learn all of them.

 James, who is seven months old, smiles benevolently at me while I address him in Dutch. When I, as a bilingual, switch to French, he starts crowing with delight. He hears that something new is happening and he is thrilled about it, as babies are excited about new things. I have had this experience many times with babies. 

But not everyone has the same linguistic talents and not everyone is offered the same opportunities to develop language. There are differences between boys and girls (Delfos, 2018). Language development in boys is often slower (Rutter & Rutter, 1993; Delfos, 2018). Children are particularly sensitive to their environment and understand situations long before words are involved (Donaldson, 1979). They therefore receive the words from their environment from this sensitivity to situations and link their understanding of the situation to the words they hear. For children, especially young children, images are very important and have great communicative value. Cook and Hess (2007) show that photographs taken by children can be meaningful. Photos that children take are not static, have more meaning for the children themselves and the adults who view them. They can give an idea of the child’s own perspective in a certain context at a certain time. In all languages, children initially make mistakes that they produce themselves and that they have not been taught. Errors that arise from their ability to abstract, whether it is an intelligent child or a child with less strong intellectual abilities. They say ‘I runned’ as a ‘perfect’ conjugation from a grammatical understanding (over-regularizing) (De Villiers & De Villiers, 1999; Stemberger, 2004), while no adult has taught him or her this. On the contrary, when the child makes such a mistake, the adult corrects the child and tells him to say: ‘I ran.’ At that point, the child learns that the verb ‘to run’ is an exception to the rule. Then the child says ‘I ran’ from now on and applies this to the whole verb and other verbs that are an exception to the conjugation rules (Rousseau, 1726/1957; Chomsky, 1975). We see how great this achievement is when adult foreigners have to learn the different foreign language where there are no conjugations of verbs, which is the case for almost all non-Western languages. These foreigners stubbornly say ‘I am listen, because verbs such as listen’ are not conjugated in their mother tongue and they have the greatest difficulty in learning how to conjugate verbs in the new language. When learning a new language as an adult, it is rare to master the new language fluently.

 In 1979, Vietnamese boat refugees came to the Netherlands. They work hard at school to master the Dutch language. But they think it’s very strange: ‘Martine, why do you say one chair, two chairs with an extra s? Surely it is clear that there is more than one? Why do you say: I bring, she brings? It is clear, it is about ‘bring’. And why do you say I ran, when you say ‘yesterday’ it is clear, then you do not have to say ‘ran’. A fresh look at your language. There are more words in Vietnamese that deal with human relations and feelings. They find it strange that one could say: I love ‘potatoes’, because love is for living creatures and not for plants. Which language is rich, do you think? (Exercise 1.2, appendix 1). 

There is a language-sensitive period (Montessori, 2018) during which the child is language-oriented and learns to master this language fluently. This period extends from birth to about seven years; then there is a sensitive period for refining the language, especially grammar and a sensitive period for learning to read and write, from about seven to ten years old. Kegl has shown that young deaf children who grow up together develop a full-fledged, grammatical sign language together. This is in contrast to deaf people who only started living together when they were adolescents. They only develop a vocabulary in the form of gestures without grammar (Kegl et al., 1999).

The capacity to learn to communicate using language is enormous, but it must be given the opportunity to be developed. Adults often make the mistake that when a child is able to pronounce the words of a language, the child is also able to formulate the questions about subjects that concern him or her. This is certainly not the case until about ten years old. For example, because of their lack of being able to put into words what they want to ask, children can ask repeat questions, that is, repeating the same question. Adults often interpret this behavior as inattentiveness and respond by saying that they have already answered, and that the child should listen. A child who asks the same question over and over again may be a child who listens poorly. But it will more often be a child who tries to achieve a certain answer without being able to formulate the right question.

 Emma is four, she is very interested in baby Oliver at the neighbors. Every time she asks: Will Oliver get the bottle? She repeats that question daily and gets the answer that Oliver gets the bottle. Until the neighbor suddenly realizes that Emma might want to ask something completely different. She asks: Do you want to give Oliver the bottle? Emma sighs with relief: “Yes”! 

Even though the child gets an elaborate answer, the child repeats the question hoping to get the desired answer. Repetitive questions are common up to the age of eight. Children are not yet able to shape a conversation properly according to the rules that adults use. For example, concise formulation is a rule that many adults use implicitly, while this is hardly feasible for children. Often without being aware of this, adults break down many of children’s initiatives for conversation. They often take too little time to let the child express what it wants to say and take over the conversation (Van Haaren, 1983). ‘Wait a minute’ is on the tongue of the adult (exercise 1.3, appendix 1). Van Haaren argues that conversations with children reflect the degree of creativity of adults. Communication with children requires playfulness and breaking free from fixed patterns. Talking to children also requires unlearning the powerlessness and fear to participate in fantasies, dreams, symbols, ideas, and feelings, says Van Haaren. It means unlearning rigidity and the performance drive to standardize, interpret, win, and compete.

If you look at toddlers who do not yet speak, you can see from their behavior that they understand an incredible amount of language. Understanding the language is always far ahead of its production. The active vocabulary - the number of words the child uses - is nowhere near reflecting the passive vocabulary - the number of words the child knows and understands. For example, there is a 5-month delay between a child’s comprehension of 50 words (at 13 months) and being able to produce 50 words (at 18 months) (Menyuk et al., 1995). Boys lag behind girls in early vocabulary (Reznick & Goldfield, 1992).

 Marec, an almost two-year-old child of political refugees, was suddenly separated from his parents and hospitalized in a completely different language environment. His parents were not allowed to go to the hospital; there was no family. During the first few days Marec still uttered some sounds that came from his own language. When there was no response, because the sounds were not understood, the child no longer took the initiative to express himself linguistically and only repeated words that he heard around him. No matter how young the child was, it was unerringly aware that its own language system was not applicable, and it devoted itself to learning the new language. 

Adults rarely take the child’s perspective. Good communication is particularly important in hospital situations (Capjon & Bjørk, 2010). It is often moving and comical to see how the toddler, who himself understands perfectly what the other is saying, can become distraught with rage and clench his fists in restrained passion, when he himself is unable to produce the language necessary to make sure the adult understands him. In fact, tantrums and hitting other children decrease in many children from about the age of three. So, from the moment on, they can make themselves somewhat understood.

1.2 Learning capacity and willingness of children

Maria Montessori (2018) argues that adults should show more respect for the child who manages to develop a language system all by himself. She says there is a lack of respect in the way adults at school offer the child the alphabet as a huge treat. They want to teach the child this, completely ignoring the colossal own learning capacity of the child who has already learned a language independently. From scratch on, the child has already mastered a large part of the phonology, semantics, grammar and pragmatics of the language before entering school (Berk, 2003). Children’s willingness to learn is also enormous. Young children, in particular, are willing to venture into new areas if they are given the opportunity to do so. This varies from learning a language to learning how to swing, from potty training to arithmetic and from washing dishes to operating a computer.

 Four-year-old Benjamin, who was still wetting the bed, was suggested to start potty training at night. He responded very benevolently and said: “Just tell me how to do it and I will do it”. His mother was very surprised by this answer and could not answer. “How do you want me to learn, if you can’t explain it to me?” was Benjamin’s response. 

In fact, children enjoy learning so much that they become absorbed in it and forget their surroundings. When they then master something, normalization sets in (Montessori, 2018), the feeling of completely coming back to oneself. They look around them and become aware again of a world from which they were closed off for a while. Young children are much less attached to certain patterns. They are quite capable of approaching things from different perspectives and approach the world less prejudiced than adults.

 A nice example of the (distorted) formation of memory by bias is the study of Allport and Postman (1947). They showed children and adults two pictures of men, a black man and a white man. The white man had a knife in his hand. Children generally remembered correctly that the white man had a knife; the adults named the black man as the one holding the knife. 

The young child perceives mainly with his or her senses, especially through the sense of smell and touch. Experiences are not, or hardly put down in words. The young child is also biologically equipped differently than the adult. For example, the child ‘looks’ with its mouth and therefore has more tactile buttons in its mouth than an adult. The young child has an essentially different form of perception, a form that the adult hardly knows anymore (Schachtel, 1973). Childhood experiences are therefore more likely to be evoked by smell or touch and not easily expressed in language. Cook and Hess (2007) give another reason why childhood memories are so difficult to access: while childhood is something common to all humans, the child within each of us tends to be buried by the conventions of adult socialization.

The human baby is born ‘too early’ and continues to mature for some thirty years after birth (Gesell and Ilg, 1949; Tanner, 1990). Partly to leave room for this, but also to allow the skull to fold up during birth, an opening has been left at the top of the skull, called the fontanelle, which only closes after one to two years. The maturation process means that there is not yet an integrated form of perception, as in adults. For example, the left and right hemispheres still function very independently until about seven years of age, the hinge age (Delfos, 2020b). The experiences are stored in fragments of smell, color and otherwise, in different areas of the brain, with few connections between them. The integration of the cerebral hemispheres takes about seven years to complete, when a change in the gene pattern also becomes visible (Fulker et al., 1993).

When children grow up, they notice that adults have a fixed, linguistic way of describing the world and there is great pressure on children to adapt to this, Schachtel argues (1973). Deviating from the norm evokes fear in the older child, but also in adults. This creates a drive for adjustment. As a result, the child will express itself more and more linguistically, because the adult asks him or her to do so. There is a wide range of communication options, with smell perhaps being one of the most important – inconscient – drives of our behavior, yet adults tend to limit themselves to linguistic communication, in contrast to the child who more eagerly uses the different possibilities and, by means of play or gestures can make something clear. Moreover, language is not only a means of communication for the child, but also an instrument for ordering. This can be clearly seen in the talking aloud of young children, the inner language (Vygotsky, 1978). This talking aloud accompanies children’s activities. It helps them to understand, organize and coordinate their activity, ‘Now I put this block in...’.

The older the child, the greater the pressure to function linguistically; non-linguistic functioning is even regularly referred to as rude by adults: ‘Do not point, just say what you want.’ With age, the use of some forms of expression decreases; for example, leaning against someone when you need support or pointing to something instead of naming it.

 Lucas, aged five, asked an adult who was busy cleaning out a room, “Where are you going to put that bin?” The adult couldn’t get the word out in her bustle. Had it been an adult, rather than a child, who asked the question, he or she would helpfully have articulated a number of possibilities at that moment: ‘Under the windowsill? In the left corner?” Lucas understood that the language system did not function that way in when someone is so busy and kindly said, “Point it,” and then correctly spelled out the place pointed to. 

How restrictive for their expression, the urge for verbal communication of adults can be for children (but also for themselves) is shown by the working methods of the kindergarten in Reggio Emilia (Edwards et al., 1993). In this Italian city, artists and educators work together to guide young children in their mode of expression and their learning process. The Reggio approach aims to promote the child’s intellectual development by systematically focusing on symbolic expressions. The result is astonishing. Through creativity, young children prove to be able to explain an incredible amount to us and their ‘art’ appeals to the imagination to such an extent that the work of the children of Reggio Emilia in an exhibition under the name The Hundred Languages of Children made a great impression worldwide. Reggio Emilia’s working method can be seen as a further development of Montessori’s thinking. The focus on children themselves and their developmental potential is central, as Montessori emphasized, but in Reggio Emilia it is extended with the wide range of possibilities of expression. So, drawing and telling are incorporated in the Reggio approach, and especially cooperation and interaction with other children. Maria Montessori (2018) paid little attention to the latter. She was more focused on the individual cognitive development of the child. In the Netherlands, too, experimental day-care centers and schools have started that are modeled on Reggio Emilia.

1.3 Reliability and suggestibility

Little has been written about conversation with children. Therefore, in this book we can only rely to a small extent on existing literature and research. What is known about conversation mainly concerns the extent to which children’s testimonies are reliable or not. For a long time, this reliability was judged very negatively. It was assumed that children, especially young children, were highly impressionable. They would be very sensitive to suggestion. Suggestibility is the degree to which someone can be led by another person to believe that something happened or what someone looks like, in a way that is not in accordance with reality nor with memory. For example, making believe that something has happened that has not actually happened (Loftus & Davies, 1984). However, up to a very young age, even three years, children are not very sensitive to suggestion when it comes to a stressful event that has happened to them and they can fairly accurately report what they have experienced (Davies, 1991; Peterson, 1999; Fivush et al., 2004). Children’s suggestibility decreases from four to eight years of age and increases again slightly from about thirteen years of age (Nurcombe, 1986). There is a correlation between the degree of suggestibility and the level of moral development. However, children appear on average to be no more dishonest than adults and no less reliable as witnesses (Nurcombe, 1986). In fact, it turns out that children can be better witnesses than adults; this applies in particular to children aged five to six (Elbers and Ter Laak, 1989). The reason given for this is that children of that age form fewer schemas about an event and thus have a less biased view of that event than adults; this promotes a more objective and accurate observation. This also came from the study of the white man and the knife mentioned above (Allport & Postman, 1947). What reduces the reliability of children’s statements about an event, on the other hand, is that at the age of five to six they are still very impressionable and open to leading questions, especially when it comes to characteristics of persons or things. They assume that the adult is serious and does not want to fool them. As a result, they do not immediately question an adult’s statement. They also spontaneously tell less (exercise 1.4, appendix 1).

 A young child who is asked if the balloons in the classroom are red or blue will quickly name a color, even if there are no balloons in the classroom. The child will not naturally question the adult’s statement to wonder if there are balloons. The question does not discuss whether there are balloons and thus suggests that there are balloons. Then there is only a discussion about which colors the balloons have. If the same child is asked whether there are balloons in the classroom and, if so, what color they are, the child will answer that there are no balloons and will not name a color. 

The question is whether children do not realize this suggestibility. A nice example is a video with the example of Santa Claus. A kindergarten teacher dresses up as Santa Claus in front of the children. They are then asked where the teacher is. The children then say that the teacher is gone. This example is sometimes used to show that children cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality. Still, further consideration is needed. If you look more closely at the video, you can see that the children hesitate when asked where the teacher is. They look at each other expectantly, searching for a clue how to respond. Then one child starts saying something and says that the teacher is not there, and the others follow. In the hesitation is probably the surprise of what the meaning of the question is. That the teacher is Santa Claus is obvious to the children, so the question must have a different meaning. The first who dares to say something, may have concluded that it is a game and is playing along with the adults. This interpretation is based on the non-verbal behavior of the children and the question is whether this interpretation is correct. However, it is less likely that the children would not know that the teacher has changed clothes, when they saw it happen before their eyes.

Adults are also very sensitive to leading questions, as the studies by Loftus and her colleagues show (Loftus, 1996). ‘What do you think of the increased crime among young people’, yields different answers than ‘Do you think that crime among young people has increased and what do you think of it in that case?’ The risk of leading questions plays an important role in constructing questionnaires. The difference in answers to the question ‘How tall is the king of France’ gives completely different answers than ‘Does France have a king and if so, how tall is he?’ Children in primary school practice with leading questions, through jokes such as: How long is a Chinese? ‘How Long’ in China could be the name of someone, in English it would be the question about the length of Chinese people.

A leading question posed to a child by an adult is normally perceived by the child as a serious question with a high degree of truth. Moreover, young children often take statements literally, due to a lack of knowledge. They are therefore less likely to look for something behind a suggestive statement. They sometimes take a question on face value. ‘How did you draw that?’ ‘With a pencil!’

 Olivia reads aloud a book about swinging for Liam of one and a half years old. There is a picture of a swing in the book. ‘Is Liam going to sit on the swing, too?’ she asks. Liam willingly takes the book and sits on it. 

Because young children pay more attention to the main points of an event than to the details (Elbers & Ter Laak, 1989), they are more impressionable when it comes to those details, for example the characteristics of things or persons rather than the action. Suggestive questions that concern details of an event or characteristics of persons are therefore less likely to be recognized as suggestive by the child.

 A day after a fight at school, the teacher asks Maria if she also got a poke from Jonas. Maria, pleased with the attention for a push she received three days earlier, quickly replies: “Yes.” In doing so, she ignores the fact that it was Dick who gave the poke and that it had been three days earlier instead of one. If the teacher had asked the question more openly and simply, not only about the action, but also about who might have performed the action (‘Did you get a poke yesterday’ and ‘From whom then’), Maria would probably have answered more correctly. 

In addition to this, with suggestive questions it is often the intention of the speaker to obscure the suggestiveness of the question, deliberately making recognition of the suggestion more difficult. Suggestiveness can sneak into a question subconsciously as a bias on the part of the speaker, but it is often also a conscious attempt to manipulate the listener.

 “You didn’t sleep with him, did you?”, a shocked mother of an adolescent girl can ask. The question is very suggestive, but it is not intended as such. The same mother can also, very manipulatively, ask the following question. “How did Elsa feel about Michel and you staying behind together?” 

The suggestibility of children mainly appears to play a role in response to adults, and it is not so much about suggestibility itself or a defective memory, but about the adult’s sphere of influence. The research of Ceci, Ross and Toglia (1987) makes this clear. They tested the influence of the age of the person providing misleading information. Their research showed that the influence is significantly smaller when the information is given by a seven-year-old child than when the deception comes from an adult. Children as young as possibly 2 years old and certainly as young as 3 years old can accurately remember events that are important to them if they are questioned in the right way (no misleading questions, no questions in a forceful way and no questions where they are only to answer yes or no) (Peterson & Rideout, 1998; Peterson, 1999).

There are several reasons for the reliability of children at the age of five to six years. First, the child is less defined and limited by language. The child has mastered the language sufficiently to be able to express himself and has not yet had the confrontation at school where he notices that he still has little mastery of the language. Second, the child has more self-confidence than one or two years later, when it becomes insecure due to failures on learning tasks at school and becomes impressed by all the knowledge the teacher has. The growing insecurity from the age of seven causes the child to adapt to adults. A third reason can be mentioned that the aforementioned integration of the brain ensures that children from the age of seven can place an event in a more coherent context. From there, they also form schemas that can promote prejudice. In addition, at the age of seven to eight, the child is more aware of the importance of verbal communication for adults and understands a little more about the characteristics of this communication and also about the various interests associated with it.

 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Varendonck conducted research into the reliability of the statements of young children in the context of a court case about a murdered child. He asked children what the color of their master’s beard was. Of the children, 90 percent answered with a color - black -, while their master had no beard. They went along with the adult’s leading question. Especially young girls with charges of sexual abuse were seen as very unreliable. The sexual abuse was considered to have arisen from their fantasy (Elbers and Ter Laak, 1989). 

The results of studies such as that of Belgian psychologist Varendonck in 1911 (Soppe & Hees-Stauhamer, 1993) have long influenced opinions regarding the reliability of children’s statements. In these studies, children were presented with very suggestive questions, and they were found to be quite ready to accept the suggestion and fall into the trap.

Only recently has there been interest in the fact that children’s functioning in such situations is strongly dependent on the context within which the conversation takes place. If leading questions are not asked, children function well in interrogation situations and certainly no worse than adults, in some ways sometimes better. Studies such as that by Lamers-Winkelman (1995) on the reliability of children with regard to sexual abuse also show that children are generally good witnesses.

The memory of young children is sometimes spectacularly good in the eyes of adults. Anyone who has ever played Memory with children knows how well their memory works. As an adult, it is almost impossible to beat a child at such memory games.

Memory can be expressed both in recognizing an event or person when presented and in remembering it. How often do we recognize someone without being able to immediately remember his or her name? Very often it is also the case that we cannot remember something, but immediately recognize it when someone else says it. In the study of memory, these two elements are examined, both ‘recognition’ and ‘remembering’. Children appear to function no worse than adults on the recognition aspect. It is even true that this decreases with age. When it comes to remembering, young children and old people function worse than adults. In young children, remembering is more difficult when the verbal element plays a more important role. Once the verbal aspect is de-emphasized, children function well in recall (Perlmutter & Ricks, 1979).

Memory is not static. It is constantly being formed and updated. This applies to both children and adults. The memory of an event is therefore not static data that is fixed in the brain, but dynamic and is constantly updated and can never be a totally exact representation of the event. For example, when an event is repeated, not every new event is saved. The deviation in the new event from the previous one is added to the similar elements. For example, when something has happened more often, in the memory it can only be actually remembered in one or two situations.

Another interesting point is the aforementioned fact that children are particularly good at depicting the big picture and less at reproducing the details of events (Fivush, 2002; Fivush et al., 1992). This diminished attention to detail is often blamed on the child as a memory deficit. But it fits well with the high degree of abstraction that children, especially very young children, use to organize the large amount of information that comes to them. Children make an abstraction of the language, to be able to communicate; they abstract who cares for them to form an attachment system, they abstract everyday events to understand how the world around them functions. The question is whether the studies, including recent ones, do sufficient justice to the capacities of children. In addition to investigating the suggestibility of children, it is useful to investigate, for example, whether children do recognize the suggestion if they are invited to do so. The fact that they are significantly less sensitive to suggestion when they talk about a stressful event in which they themselves have been involved, suggests that they do make the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ and that their impressionable behavior mainly reflects social adaptation (Peterson, 1999; Fivush et al., 2004). It is also questionable whether children are just as impressionable when the interrogators are other children rather than adults, because children may contest the statements of adults less than those of their peers. The research of Ceci and colleagues (1987), in which children are examined as interrogators, is already a pointer in this direction.

1.4 Fantasy and reality

Children are supposed to be unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Piaget (1954) indicates that children up to the age of seven or eight have a strong tendency to fantasy and are unable to properly distinguish between fantasy and reality. Maria Montessori, who is otherwise so child-oriented, wanted to banish children’s imaginations as quickly as possible. Fantasy got in the way of mastering the real world and, in her view, limited cognitive development (2018). With this, this (first female) Italian doctor is diametrically opposed to her current compatriots in Reggio Emilia, who take fantasy as the starting point for the development of children. Yet it is true that the Reggio approach builds on the Montessori tradition and that the cultural Italian heritage can be found in both. The emphasis of this heritage is on the big, unused learning capacity of children, the respect for their abilities and the need for a modest, supportive attitude on the part of the educator. In contrast to Piaget, among others, current researchers indicate that the child can indeed distinguish between fantasy and reality. They can do this at the age of two and a half, when they are barely able to express this linguistically (Fraiberg, 1968). Children know that witches, gnomes, and ghosts are non-existent figures. However, when adults pretend that these figures exist, as in the Santa Claus story, children do not easily question the credibility of adults. That does not mean they would not do that internally. They may remain silent out of loyalty to their parents. Even taking advantage of a situation, can play a role, such as the fear of losing presents around Santa Claus when you admit you do not believe in Santa Claus.

The question is whether children can indeed make no difference between reality and fantasy. It is completely implausible that a toddler who says he sees a gnome walking on the grass suffers from a hallucination and actually sees a gnome. He is fully able to experience the difference between a gnome he says walks on the lawn and the dog he actually sees walking there.

However, there are important differences between adults and children in how they deal with fantasy. First, children’s capacity for fantasy is bigger than that of adults (Schachtel, 1973). Children can elaborate and fantasize about a subject that fascinates them.

A second difference between children and adults in dealing with fantasy is that children tend not to communicate the truthfulness of a statement. It is probably this element that makes it so difficult for adults to determine whether a child can tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Because children think that adults are omniscient (see 3.3.7), they will consider it superfluous to let an adult know that they are switching from reality to fantasy or that a story is entirely fantasy. They are therefore very surprised if the adult does not know for sure.

 Those who play intensively with children notice that the child loses track for a moment when the adult seems to be completely absorbed in the game. The child doubts whether the adult is aware that it is a game. The child quickly brings the adult back to reality by saying: ‘It’s not real, it’s fake’. 

Harris (2000) argues that children can indeed make the difference between fantasy and reality. However, like adults, they can react sharply to imaginary figures. The differences in outcomes between different studies of communication with children may well be related to this aspect of lack of feedback from the child to the adult. The adult can interpret the child’s story as a moment when the child does not distinguish fantasy from reality, while the child knows this but does not let the adult know. It should be noted that due to the lack of knowledge about the world and the degree of credibility that children attribute to adults, children are regularly taught to receive fantasy as reality. The story of the ‘stork’ is a good solution for the difficulty that adults have in providing sex education, but it distorts the image that children can get of reality. Talking about leprechauns you see popping in and out mushrooms as you walk through the woods, can give children the impression that adults see things they do not. Yet children soon realize that adults also say things that are fantasized and deceive children. This can cause children to take adults less seriously. The same goes for not being understood by adults. When children feel that the adult is making a ‘stupid’ mistake by not understanding the child, the child can turn to fantasy and go with the story. The child traps the adult, as shown in the example below.

My dad’s cat got run over.

He has been run over.

It’s dead. I buried him.

Where did you bury him?

In the garden, here.

Oh yeah. And do you ever go and look there it?

He’s in heaven.

He’s in heaven. How do you know that?

Because I heard that from my father.

Your father said … eh … that … eh … that the cat is in heaven now?

Yes!

Yes. What do you think about him being in heaven?

Well then God can repair him.

Can God repair him then? Oh, that’s nice.

Then it won’t be a cat.

What will it be then?

Then he becomes a dangerous man. He will become mean, get the police, that’s what he will do, and the uh … , then the police are going to put that man in jail.

Oh, in heaven?