Children's Leadership Strategies in Early Childhood

Young children's leadership is an undertheorized and underresearched topic. Much of the research literature involves paired children working on adult-set tasks that are aimed to provide data on specific aspects of children's collaborative work. This article describes and discusses an investigation into children's leadership styles within independent collaborative play episodes. The research project involved observing children's independent collaborative play in a daylong early childhood setting one morning a week for 5 months. It was an interpretivist study, and the researcher did not participate in any way in the children's play, which was documented using field notes and digital photographs. Although clear gender differences in leadership styles were evident, the predominant boy leader only used assertive strategies, whereas the predominant girl leaders used physical assertive strategies rather than relational strategies to exert their control. It is suggested that individual cultural experiences and contextual factors play a greater part in children's leadership in early childhood education than current gender-focused explanations would suggest.