A corpus of children's personal narratives was analyzed for themes of passi
vity and disaffiliation. the polar opposites of agency and communion, respe
ctively. The subjects were 96 working class children between the ages of 4
and 9 years. In their personal narratives, children cited themes of passivi
ty more than themes of disaffiliation, with weakness being the most frequen
tly cited individual theme of passivity. With age, children increasingly de
scribed weakness in others. Correlations across the agency-passivity and co
mmunion-disaffiliation modalities revealed theoretically unpredicted. but e
mpirically interpretable, results.