A Study On The Tendency And Developmental Features Of Forgiveness In 3 To 6 Years Old Children

Forgiveness has recently been one of the important topics in positive psychology research. The research had proved that there has significant age difference in the development level of forgiveness. The study was based on summarizing contents including the concept, development stage, influencing factors of forgiveness and the method to research forgiveness. The study explored the tendency, the reasoning, and the development features of forgiveness in 3-6 years old children, use the method of interview, story and observation .The results showed:1. Although the 3-6 years old children cannot clearly understand the concept of "forgiveness" and cannot connect their behavior with the concept explicitly, but they already displayed the tendency of forgiveness. Their tendency of forgiveness is showed by "pardon somebody".2. The study showed that there are no significant differences in grades, genders and offence situation types of the children's reasoning about forgiveness.3. Most of the children's forgiving reasons are based on "apologize or repent of one's mistakes", "the intention and the severity of the consequence" and "the relations or the appraisement". Few of them to make their decisions to forgive are based on the reason of "cancellation of consequences" and "punishment and retaliation". Only one child took "expectation of others" as her forgiving reason.4. A majority of the 3-6 years old children's forgiving reasons are belong to the "Revengeful Forgiveness" and the "Restitutional or Compensational Forgiveness", but one child's forgiving reason belongs to the "Expectational Forgiveness", and the others' forgiving reasons are between "Expectational Forgiveness" and "Lawful Expectational Forgiveness". This may be attributed to the materiality, instability and juvenility of their moral development levels.5. The way of moral education that teachers adopted may be a important factor that influences the children's forgiving reasons.6. The 3-6 years old children's expressions of forgiving reasons are not consistent with their real behavior entirely. Most of them cannot forgive others initiatively in their real lives, they usually need to be enlightened by adults.