Conflict, as a natural part of daily life is to some extent inevitable in all child care centers. Children need to develop effective strategies to deal with conflict, and educators need to reduce the amount of conflict present in the total child care environment. Two roles early childhood educators can play in encouraging conflict resolution are (1) to assist children in developing conflict resolution skills and (2) to implement peace and conflict education curricula in the classroom. The wholistic approach to conflict resolution goes beyond these two child-centered approaches to include the administrative, parental, and teacher dimensions of conflict. This paper discusses several approaches to conflict resolution and includes the following sections: (1) "The Child Centered Approach," including individual negotiation and development of a conflict resolution curriculum from a global perspective; (2) "The Wholistic Approach," encompassing both children's and adult's conflicts in early childhood settings, and asserting that critical reflection on all the patterns of conflict is necessary to a peaceful child care environment; (3) "The Child-Centered/Wholistic Link," including a conflict scenario along with a discussion of crisis management and prevention; and (4) "Constructive Communication: The Key to Wholistic Conflict Resolution," outlining Virginia Satir's (1988) theory of communication styles--placater, blamer, distracter, computer, and negotiator. The paper concludes by noting that the wholistic approach to conflict resolution can best be achieved through implementing the negotiator communication style and that effective negotiation between early childhood teachers, administrators, parents, and children is essential to building high-quality child care programs. (BGC)