When children start keeping secrets
Sharing secrets plays an important role in friendships. But children first have to learn what a secret is and what it means.
It takes quite a while for children to learn not to tell secrets. A research group led by Zoe Liberman from the University of California in Santa Barbara now reports that it is only from the age of around six that children understand that secrets are something special. The team concludes this from a series of experiments with younger and older children now published in "Developmental Psychology".
The group initially used drawings to test a total of 118 children to see whether they would trust a friend or a classmate to keep a secret. Children aged three to five did not yet see any difference here, but those aged six to eleven did: they realised that confidential information was better kept with a friend. As was shown in another experiment with 255 participants, children only understand from the age of six that telling a secret harms a friendship.
The younger children, on the other hand, made no distinction between personal secrets and mere facts. The group of researchers concluded from these findings that the particular importance of shared secrets for close social relationships develops over the course of childhood. Accordingly, eight-year-olds can normally be expected to keep a secret to themselves simply because it is a secret. Four-year-olds, on the other hand, simply cannot yet appreciate what it means to share a secret with someone close to them, according to the findings of Liberman and her team.
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