Forty five-year-old children were interviewed about conflict with peers and also were observed in interactions with their playmates. Half of the children had a depressed caregiver, a condition known both to be associated with familial conflict and to place children at risk for externalizing problems, as well as internalizing problems. Associations between children's views about how conflicts are resolved and their actual behaviors in conflict situations were identified. Children who were observed to engage in more protracted conflicts with their friends, were also more likely to recommend aggressive tactics in resolving conflict in a hypothetical situation (mainly for children of depressed mothers). Young children, in general, showed sophisticated understanding of the distressing quality of disputes and they held systematic views about the nature of conflict. There were individual differences in their endorsements of tactics used to resolve conflict, that were primarily related to the child's gender and the mother's affective disorder. Sons of depressed mothers were very likely to recommend aggressive solutions to peer conflicts while the daughters virtually never endorsed aggressive solutions. Boys and girls of well mothers did not differ. These exaggerations of normative sex role patterns in children at risk, associated with parental affective disorder, may reflect the development of entrenched, stereotyped ways of coping that are precursors of internalizing vs. externalizing problems in females vs. males, respectively.
