Child-Animal Interaction: Nonverbal Dimensions
The examination of children’s interactions with animals supports important generalizations about the roles of animals in social development, and also about the ability of the children to interact. These observations demonstrate that to preschool children, “a basic sense of self forms in relation to the available interspecies community of early development rather than the strictly human community.” The responses of the children were differentiated across both animal and human patterns of interaction; children behaved differently according to variations in the animals’ agency, coherence, continuity, and affectivity. For young children, animals are social others that engage differently from other humans. Interactions with animals appear to be more primary than human-centered in the child’s experience.