Young children interpret some acts performed by adults as normatively governed, that is, as capable of being performed either rightly or wrongly. In previous experiments, children have made this interpretation when adults introduced them to novel acts with normative language (e.g. ‘this is the way it goes’), along with pedagogical cues signaling culturally important information, and with social-pragmatic marking that this action is a token of a familiar type. In the current experiment, we exposed children to (...) novel actions with no normative language, and we systematically varied pedagogical and social-pragmatic cues in an attempt to identify which of them, if either, would lead children to normative interpretations. We found that young 3-year-old children inferred normativity without any normative language and without any pedagogical cues. The only cue they used was adult socialpragmatic marking of the action as familiar, as if it were a token of a well-known type (as opposed to performing it, as if inventing it on the spot). These results suggest that – in the absence of explicit normative language – young children interpret adult actions as normatively governed based mainly on the intentionality (perhaps signaling conventionality) with which they are performed. (shrink)

Three experiments with preschool- and young school-aged children (N = 75 and 53) explored the kinds of relations children detect in samples of instances (descriptive problem) and how they generalize those relations to new instances (inferential problem). Each experiment initially presented a perfect biconditional relation between two features (e.g., all and only frogs are blue). Additional examples undermined one of the component conditional relations (not all frogs are blue) but supported another (only frogs are blue). Preschool-aged (...) class='Hi'>children did not distinguish between supported and undermined relations. Older children did show the distinction, at least when the test instances were clearly drawn from the same population as the training instances. Results suggest that younger children’s difficulties may stem from the demands of using imperfect correlations for predictions. Older children seemed sensitive to the inferential problem of using samples to make predictions about populations. (shrink)

Social norms have played a key role in the evolution of human cooperation, serving to stabilize prosocial and egalitarian behavior despite the self-serving motives of individuals. Young children’s behavior mostly conforms to social norms, as they follow adult behavioral directives and instructions. But it turns out that even preschool children also actively enforce social norms on others, often using generic normative language to do so. This behavior is not easily explained by individualistic motives; it is more likely (...) a result of children’s growing identification with their cultural group, which leads to prosocial motives for preserving its ways of doing things. (shrink)

Human social life is structured by social norms creating both obligations and entitlements. Recent research has found that young children enforce simple obligations against norm violators by protesting. It is not known, however, whether they understand entitlements in the sense that they will actively object to a second party attempting to interfere in something that a third party is entitled to do — what we call counter-protest. In two studies, we found that 3-year-old children understand when a (...) person is entitled to do something, and so they actively defend this person’s entitlement against unjustified interference from second parties. In some cases, they even enforce second-order entitlements, for example, in the case of ownership where an owner is entitled to entitle others to use the owner’s property. (shrink)

Young children generally learn words from other people. Recent research has shown that children can learn new actions and skills from nonhuman agents. This study examines whether young children could learn words from a robot. Preschool children were shown a video in which either a woman or a mechanical robot labeled novel objects. Then the children were asked to select the objects according to the names used in the video. The results revealed that (...) children in the human condition were more likely to select the correct objects than those in the robot condition. Nevertheless, the five-year-old children in the robot condition performed significantly better than chance level, while the four-year olds did not. Thus there is a developmental difference in children’s potential to learn words from a robot. The results contribute to our understanding of how children interact with non-human agents. Keywords: developmental cybernetics; word learning; social cognition; cognitive development. (shrink)

Children bring intuitive arithmetic knowledge to the classroom before formal instruction in mathematics begins. For example, children can use their number sense to add, subtract, compare ratios, and even perform scaling operations that increase or decrease a set of dots by a factor of 2 or 4. However, it is currently unknown whether children can engage in a true division operation before formal mathematical instruction. Here we examined the ability of 6- to 9-year-old children and college (...) students to perform symbolic and non-symbolic approximate division. Subjects were presented with non-symbolic or symbolic dividends ranging from 32 to 185, and non-symbolic divisors ranging from 2 to 8. Subjects compared their imagined quotient to a visible target quantity. Both children and adults were successful at the approximate division tasks in both dots and numeral formats. This was true even among the subset of children that could not recognize the division symbol or solve simple division equations, suggesting intuitive division ability precedes formal division instruction. For both children and adults, the ability to divide non-symbolically mediated the relation between Approximate Number System acuity and symbolic math performance, suggesting that the ability to calculate non-symbolically may be a mechanism of the relation between ANS acuity and symbolic math. Our findings highlight the intuitive arithmetic abilities children possess before formal math instruction. (shrink)

The ability of 3- and 4-year-old children to disregard advice from an overtly misleading informant was investigated across five studies (total n = 212). Previous studies have documented limitations in young children's ability to reject misleading advice. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that these limitations are primarily due to an inability to reject specific directions that are provided by others, rather than an inability to respond in a way that is opposite to what has (...) been indicated by a cue. In Studies 1 through 4, a puppet identified as The Big Bad Wolf offered advice to participants about which of two boxes contained a hidden sticker. Regardless of the form the advice took, 3-year olds performed poorly by failing to systematically reject it. However, when participants in Study 5 believed they were responding to a mechanical cue rather than the advice of the Wolf, they were better able to reject misleading advice, and individual differences in performance on the primary task were systematically correlated with measures of executive function. Results are interpreted as providing support for the communicative intent hypothesis, which posits that children find it especially difficult to reject deceptive information that they perceive as being intentionally communicated by others. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of the language used when teaching mathematics to young children. It proposes that an important part of the teaching of a mathematical concept is the introduction of specific terminology. Children may need to be taught new meanings for already familiar words. The timing of these introductions to new words or meanings is critical to their understanding of the concepts being taught. It will be argued that there are two aspects of the (...) class='Hi'>children's learning that need to be considered. First, their understanding of the concept being introduced, and secondly, their learning the appropriate word to describe that concept. By assessing children's understanding of new mathematical concepts through their own use of the terminology, the teacher can then negotiate new meanings with them through practical experiences, introducing new word meanings only when the concepts have been understood. (shrink)

Research on young children in environmental education (EE) has focused on unstructured play in, or experiencing, nature. Little attention has been paid to young children’s stewardship efforts, or to the relation of such efforts to young children’s learning and capacity to contribute to their communities and local nature. This perspectives paper draws on the first author’s experience guiding pre-k and kindergarten children (4–6 years old) in outdoor educational projects in Santo Domingo (SD), Dominican (...) Republic, in which the children produced a park guide and a short film. In addition to becoming resources for the local community, these products are an example of children’s civic contributions. In “return on investment” language, guiding young children in outdoor experiences and reflecting on the experience represent the investment and the park guide and other products, and importantly, children’s recognition of their ability to make contributions to their community, represent the return on investment. Based on our observations that young children can make significant contributions to their communities when given the opportunity, this perspectives paper argues for a research agenda and investment in opportunities for young children to contribute to their socio-ecological communities. To support our perspective, we first review and critique the prevailing and emerging paradigms of early childhood EE, following which we briefly describe the Santo Domingo (SD) project, and close by integrating past work with the first author’s experience to argue for the importance of including young children in stewardship efforts. (shrink)

This second edition of Young Children and the Environment is a practical resource that illustrates the difference that early childhood educators can make by working with children, their families and the wider community to tackle the contemporary issue of sustainable living. This second edition has been substantially revised and updated, with a new section exploring sustainability education in a variety of global contexts. Researched and written by authors recognised as leaders in their own countries, this section provides (...) readers with international resources and perspectives to further their teaching about early childhood education for sustainability. The text engages with new curriculum initiatives that have placed greater emphasis on educating for sustainability, and equips educators with the knowledge to teach this revised content. It remains accessibly written with ample case studies, vignettes and 'Provocations' to engage readers and provide insights into how early childhood education for sustainability can occur successfully in practice. (shrink)

Disoriented animals from ants to humans reorient in accord with the shape of the surrounding surface layout: a behavioral pattern long taken as evidence for sensitivity to layout geometry. Recent computational models suggest, however, that the reorientation process may not depend on geometrical analyses but instead on the matching of brightness contours in 2D images of the environment. Here we test this suggestion by investigating young children's reorientation in enclosed environments. Children reoriented by extremely subtle geometric properties (...) of the 3D layout: bumps and ridges that protruded only slightly off the floor, producing edges with low contrast. Moreover, children failed to reorient by prominent brightness contours in continuous layouts with no distinctive 3D structure. The findings provide evidence that geometric layout representations support children's reorientation. (shrink)

Young children help others in a range of situations, relatively indiscriminate of the characteristics of those they help. Recent results have suggested that young children’s helping behaviour extends even to humanoid robots. However, it has been unclear how characteristics of robots would influence children’s helping behaviour. Considering previous findings suggesting that certain robot features influence adults’ perception of and their behaviour towards robots, the question arises of whether young children’s behaviour and perception would (...) follow the same principles. The current study investigated whether two key characteristics of a humanoid robot (animate autonomy and friendly expressiveness) would affect children’s instrumental helping behaviour and their perception of the robot as an animate being. Eighty-two 3-year-old children participated in one of four experimental conditions manipulating a robot’s ostensible animate autonomy (high/low) and friendly expressiveness (friendly/neutral). Helping was assessed in an out-of-reach task and animacy ratings were assessed in a post-test interview. Results suggested that both children’s helping behaviour, as well as their perception of the robot as animate, were unaffected by the robot’s characteristics. The findings indicate that young children’s helping behaviour extends largely indiscriminately across two important characteristics. These results increase our understanding of the development of children’s altruistic behaviour and animate-inanimate distinctions. Our findings also raise important ethical questions for the field of child-robot interaction. (shrink)

How should knowledge be analyzed? Compositionally, as having constituents like belief and justification, or as an atomic concept? In making arguments for or against these perspectives, epistemologists have begun to use experimental evidence from developmental psychology and developmental linguistics. If we were to conclude that knowledge were developmentally prior to belief, then we might have a good basis to claim that belief is not a constituent of knowledge. In this review, I present a broad range of developmental evidence from the (...) past decade and discuss some of the implications it has for the proper analysis of knowledge. The orthodox perspective from the developmental literature was one where children fail to understand belief and knowledge concepts until later in childhood, with typical asymmetries in belief attribution and knowledge attribution. But what emerges from both a discussion of newer findings and a contextualization of older findings is a picture of development whereby core competence with belief and knowledge concepts emerges much earlier than previously thought that apparent failures in later childhood may be explained by other aspects of development than conceptual development and that there is no clear evidence that knowledge attributions emerge earlier than belief attributions. (shrink)

Although there is much interest in the development of prosocial behaviour in young children, and many interventions that attempt to cultivate kindness in children, there is a paucity of research exploring children’s lived experiences of kindness and including their voices. In this study, children’s understanding of kindness is approached through qualitative interviews using puppets. Interviews were conducted with 33 children aged 5-6 years in 3 schools in the United Kingdom. Through thematic analysis, 4 themes (...) were developed: doing things for others, relating with others, rules and values, and kindness affects us. These themes are examined in light of current thinking on prosocial and sociomoral development, and several key insights are highlighted, including types of prosocial behaviour, social connection, kindness-by-omission and defending, in-group bias, universal kindness versus personal safety, self-image, and a desire to improve the condition of society. These findings have implications for future research on prosocial development and for the design of kindness-based interventions, as well as providing an ecologically valid method of inquiry for use with young children. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children’s (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity. Further experiments probed the sources of younger children’s difficulty by comparing children’s performance placing a target object in a hole, on a (...) 2-dimensional form, or atop another solid object. Together, the findings suggest that some factors limiting adults’ object representations, including the difficulty of comparing the shapes of positive and negative spaces and of representing shapes in 3 dimensions, contribute to young children’s errors in manipulating objects. (shrink)

Recent research has provided compelling evidence that children experience the negative counterfactual emotion of regret, by manipulating the presence of a counterfactual action that would have led to participants receiving a better outcome. However, it remains unclear if children similarly experience regret’s positive counterpart, relief. The current study examined children’s negative and positive counterfactual emotions in a novel gain-or-loss context. Four- to 9-year-old children (N = 136) were presented with two opaque boxes concealing information that would (...) lead to a gain or loss of stickers, respectively. Half of the children chose between two keys that matched each box, whereas the other half were compelled to select one box because only one of the two keys matched. After seeing inside the alternative, non-chosen box, children were significantly more likely to report a change in emotion when they could have opened that box than when they could not have. The effects were similar for children who lost stickers and won stickers, and neither effect varied with age. These findings suggest that children may become capable of experiencing regret and relief around the same time, although their expression of these counterfactual emotions may vary with actual and counterfactual gains and losses. (shrink)

What follows is one piece of a series of conversations that I conducted with a small group of young children in a day care center where I was working in 1983. The children were between the ages of 3 and 6, and we had been together long enough to speak frankly and comfortably with each other. I used small group time to ask six questions, all of them about the ultimate issues - the origins, ends, and limits (...) of things, death, dreams, soul, spirit, self, God, evil. Taken together, the conversations we had make for a transcript of 65 manuscript pages. The issues raised there are many, and provoke questions not only about how young children think, but how adults influence them to think. The issues taken up below - the origins of things - was continued past this conversation, and its sequel will appear in the next issue of Analytic Teaching. Although the text tends to speak for itself, a few comments on the pattern of the conversation follow the transcript. (shrink)

The ways in which event memories may be reconstructed or transformed through discussion with others is a critical question both for understanding basic memory processes and for issues concerning legal testimony. In this research, white middle-class preschool children were interviewed first by their mothers and then by a female experimenter about personally experienced events when they were 40, 46, 58, and 70 months of age. Analyses indicated that at all four time points children only incorporated about 9% of (...) the information initially recounted by the mother into their independent recall of the event with the experimenter. Moreover, children only repeated about 20% of the information they themselves recalled across the two interviews. Additional analyses indicated that information mutually discussed by the mother and child was no more likely to be incorporated or repeated when recalling the event with the experimenter than information not mutually discussed. These results indicate that young children′s personal memories are not so fragile that they easily incorporate information provided by another into their own recall. (shrink)

As a way of human-computer interaction, game-based assessment is more suitable for young children because it is situational, interesting, and effective. National identity is an important factor affecting the overall development of young children and the future development of a country, which has attracted extensive attention from researchers. Nevertheless, the assessment of young children's national identity is still based on traditional evaluation, including questionnaires and interviews, which have the limitations of being inaccurate, dull, and (...) time-consuming. To understand the characteristics of children's national identity, it is necessary to use scientific and interactive assessment methods. The present study investigated whether the game-based assessment we developed specifically would be an appropriate tool to measure young children's national identity. The results show that the game-based assessment had good item discrimination. Exploratory factor analysis demonstrated the game covered three aspects: national cognition mastery, national emotion engagement, and national behavior tendency. The confirmatory factor analysis suggested that the model with three factors fit the data well. The internal consistency, the split-half reliability, and the test-retest reliability meet standards. Overall, the results indicated that this game can be successfully used to assess young children's national identity with acceptable validity and reliability. Our study provides strong evidence for the use of human-computer interaction in child measurement. These findings are the first to demonstrate the promise of game-based assessment in assessing children's national identity reliably and effectively. (shrink)

Prior work shows that children selectively learn from credible speakers. Yet little is known how they treat information from non-credible speakers. This research examined to what extent and under what conditions children may or may not learn from problematic sources. In three studies, we found that children displayed trust toward previously inaccurate speakers. Children were equally likely to extend labels from previously accurate and inaccurate speakers to novel objects. Moreover, they expected third parties to share labels (...) provided by previously inaccurate speakers. Only when there was clear evidence that the speakers' information was wrong, did young children reject the label. Together, the findings provide evidence that young children do not completely ignore the labels supplied by non-credible speakers unless there is strong reason to do so. (shrink)

Young children are prolific question-askers. The growing ubiquity of voice interfaces (e.g., Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa), as well as the availability of voice input in search fields, now make it possible for children to ask questions via Internet search when they are able to speak clearly, but before they have learned to read and write, typically between 3 and 6 years of age. The prevalence of voice search makes it important to understand children’s changing conceptions of (...) digital devices as a source of information and the role of technology-mediated question-asking in development. While limited research has focused on young children's use of voice interfaces, reviewing two related bodies of literature sheds light on how this use might unfold. This paper brings together studies of how children look for information, and of how they perceive and understand the informational and social roles of technology, drawing on human-computer interaction research. We conclude by highlighting lines of questioning for future work on younger children’s interaction through voice search. (shrink)

This article explores tentatively how young children develop a sense of beauty and should be guided in doing so. Beauty is partly a matter of personal preference, but it implies a more profound and considered idea than what is pleasing or attractive. Beauty contributes to well-being and a flourishing life. Since ideas of beauty vary over time and are transmitted through culture and socialization, these are affected by socio-cultural factors such as gender, ethnicity, class and age. Children’s (...) perceptions of beauty often differ from those of adults. A sense of what is beautiful or otherwise is based mainly in emotional and sensory responses but also involves cognitive processes and judgements. Unconscious learning by immersion in beautiful environments helps children sense what is beautiful. They benefit from a wide range of opportunities and experiences and time to dwell on these and to re-present them kinaesthetically, visually and using language. While the arts and nature provide particularly fertile opportunities, aesthetic development can occur in most contexts. The role of adults should be more that of facilitator, providing opportunities, encouragement and example, than instructor. Implications for the education of the whole child are considered. (shrink)

Even babies have an implicit appreciation of the relationship between realistic pictures and the objects that they depict, but a mature understanding of pictures involves an explicit appreciation of how pictures work. Adults appreciate that pictures are public representations that can communicate information to other people, and that some pictures are better at doing this than others. We explore the foundations of this understanding in young children. In three experiments, using yes/no and forced-choice questions, we find that 3- (...) and 4-year olds understand that other people benefit from pictures that contain greater perceptual detail and that the more realistic the picture, the better it is as a symbolic vehicle. (shrink)

Children ranging from 3 to 5 years were introduced to two anthropomorphic robots that provided them with information about unfamiliar animals. Children treated the robots as interlocutors. They supplied information to the robots and retained what the robots told them. Children also treated the robots as informants from whom they could seek information. Consistent with studies of children's early sensitivity to an interlocutor's non-verbal signals, children were especially attentive and receptive to whichever robot displayed the (...) greater non-verbal contingency. Such selective information seeking is consistent with recent findings showing that although young children learn from others, they are selective with respect to the informants that they question or endorse. (shrink)

Young children's social learning is a topic of great interest. Here, we examined preschoolers’ help-seeking as a social information gathering activity that may optimize and support children's opportunities for learning. In a toy assembly task, we assessed each child's competency at assembling toys and the difficulty of each step of the task. We hypothesized that children's help-seeking would be a function of both initial competency and task difficulty. The results confirmed this prediction; all children were (...) more likely to seek assistance on difficult steps and less competent children sought assistance more often. Moreover, the magnitude of the help-seeking requests similarly related to both competency and difficulty. The results provide support for viewing children's help-seeking as an information gathering activity, indicating that preschoolers flexibly adjust the level and amount of assistance to optimize their opportunities for learning. (shrink)

Given the complexity of human social life, it is astonishing to observe how quickly children adapt to their social environment. To be accepted by the other members, it is crucial to understand and follow the rules and norms shared by the group. How and from whom do young children learn these social rules? In the experiments, based on the crucial role of affective social learning and dominance hierarchies in simple rule understanding, we showed 15-to-23-month-olds and 3-to-5-year-old (...) class='Hi'>children videos where the agents’ body size and affective cues were manipulated. In the dominant rule-maker condition, when a smaller protagonist puts an object in one location, a bigger agent reacts with a positive reaction; on the contrary, when the smaller protagonist puts an object in another location, the bigger agent displays a negative reaction. In the subordinate rule-maker condition, the roles are shifted but the agents differ. Toddlers expect the protagonist to follow the rules (based on anticipatory looks), independent of the dominant status of the rule-making agent. Three-to-five-year-old pre-schoolers overall perform at the chance level but expect the protagonist to disobey a rule in the first trial, and obey the rule in the second trial if the rule-maker is dominant. (shrink)

The subject of this book is young children's emotional-social learning and development within early childhood care and education settings in Aotearoa-New Zealand. The focus on emotional complexity fills a gap in early childhood care and education research where young children are frequently framed narrowly as 'learners,' ignoring the importance of emotional functioning and the feelings with which children make sense of themselves and the world. This book draws on original data in the form of narrative-like (...) framed events to creatively illustrate the complexities in children's diverse ways of feeling, thinking, playing, being, and becoming. Events illuminate the feelings and meanings of observed experiences in holistic and contextualised gestalts. Awareness of unconscious processes, the feeling of feelings, and cultural dimensions of development and meaning-making are addressed. The book emphasises the emergent and psychodynamic nature of children's development and learning with strong links to the role of play and playfulness in the events, drawing on two ethnographically inspired research projects that present theory, experience and practice in real-life events. (shrink)

Gathering thoughts -- Teachers who inspired me -- What am I? : Montessori? Steiner? eclectic? : Is it important? -- Which comes first? : a philosophical framework, theory and research evidence : what do teachers and other practitioners need to bring out their best work -- Working with principles which are interpreted and embedded in articulated practice -- The importance of parent partnership and the development of moral values and self-discipline -- Play : a very complex thing -- Finding how (...) to position myself in relation to play -- Inclusion : commonalities, differences"fragmentation or wholeness?"-- Cultivating creativity -- Remaining a generalist rather than becoming a specialist within one area of early childhood education -- Changing political climates -- How best to train teachers of young children -- Remaining a Froebelian but still exploring why and wondering "will I always be one?". (shrink)

Poor nutrition habits have been reported in the childcare setting. While the literature advocates the need to carry out ‘Voice of the Child’ research, few studies have explored this methodology with regard to children and food, in particular in the pre-school setting. This article aims to outline the ethical issues raised by a research ethics committee and to discuss the impact of these issues on a study that hoped to determine the food perceptions of children (aged three to (...) four years) within an ongoing nutrition and lifestyle pre-school project in Ireland. Ethical approval was granted for this study but only upon the clarification of two aspects: that only hedonic symbols previously used in the literature could be included in the study; and that parental consent be obtained from both parents of each child. Children were shown food pictures and asked to use the hedonic symbols to answer questions posed to them on the food. Owing to the ethical constraints imposed by the requirement for two-parent consent, seven children, from a potential sample of 85, were eligible to partake in the study. These children did not seem to understand the hedonic symbols recommended for use by the ethics committee, therefore preventing the collection of in-depth qualitative data. The ethical constraints placed on this study impacted on both its design and its methodology and are discussed in relation to national and international ethical guidance and legislation. Future research with children regarding food choice must balance the need for strict ethical standards with the need to explore children’s views on this subject. (shrink)

In this paper we address the question how children come to understand normativity through simple forms of social interaction. A recent line of research suggests that even very young children can understand social norms quite independently of any moral context. We focus on a methodological procedure developed by Rakoczy et al., Developmental Psychology, 44, 875–881, that measures children’s protest behaviour when a pre-established constitutive rule has been violated. Children seem to protest when they realize that (...) rule violations are not allowed or should not have happened. We point out that there is more than one possible explanation for children’s reactions in these studies. They could be due to disobeying an authority, an inability to follow a rule, or the violation of an empirical expectation due to the mismatch between statement and action. We thus question whether it would still count as an indicator for normative understanding if children responded to aspects of the game other than the violation of a constitutive rule and conclude that the protesting behavior, when taken in isolation, does not suffice as evidence for normative understanding. (shrink)

We address Dubourg and Baumard's claim that imaginary worlds are most appealing early in the lifespan when the exploratory drive is highest. Preschool-age children prefer fictions set in the real world, and fantastical information can be difficult for children to represent in real time. We speculate that a drive to explore imaginary worlds may emerge after children acquire substantial real-world skills and knowledge. An account of age effects on fictional preferences should encompass developmental change.

Fifty-five 4-year-old children took part in a study focused on children's accounts of the situations that caused happiness, anger, sadness and fear in themselves, their friends, and their mothers. Themes, agents, and adequacy of accounts were studied at two time points. Interpersonal causes of anger and happiness were cited by many children; confusion about causes of anger and sadness was not evident, although the notion of loss and controllability as factors distinguishing causes of anger versus sadness found (...) some support. Accounts for self, friend, and mother differed considerably, suggesting emotion understanding could usefully be considered in relation to specific relationships. Analysis of individual differences showed that children who scored high on deception, emotion understanding, and false belief tasks at 47 months gave more adequate and differentiated accounts of mothers' and friends' emotions seven months later. Implications for our views of children's close relationships are discussed. (shrink)

Kidney donation by young children and the mentally retarded has been supported by court decisions, arguments based on obligations inherent in family relationships, an array of contextual factors, and the principle of beneficence. These justifications for taking organs from people who cannot protect themselves are problematic and must be weighed against our obligation to protect the vulnerable. A compromise solution is presented that strongly protects young children and the mentally retarded but does not abdicate all responsibility (...) to relieve suffering. Guidelines are proposed that prohibit the retrieval of kidneys from young children and the mentally retarded but permit one exception. They would allow retrieval of a kidney when the consequence to a first order relative with whom the donor has a meaningful and valuable relationship is otherwise imminent death. This would be done in accordance with additional guidelines that minimize harm to the donor. Since most patients with end stage renal disease can be maintained on dialysis the need for a kidney to prevent death should be an uncommon occurrence. This compromise is proposed as a solution to a dilemma that exists because two ethical principles are in conflict and one cannot be honored without violating the other. (shrink)