Happily Unhelpful: Infants' Everyday Helping and its Connections to Early Prosocial Development
Stuart I Hammond1, Celia A Brownell2
1School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada.
Frontiers in Psychology
|October 10, 2018
Summary
Young children
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Prosocial Behavior Research
Background:
- Limited research exists on young children's everyday helping behaviors at home.
- Children's participation in chores, even when inefficient, offers insights into early prosocial development.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate prosocial tendencies and everyday helping in children aged 1-4 years.
- To examine parental perceptions of children's helping behaviors, their helpfulness, and attributed motives.
- To explore age-related changes and gender differences in children's helping.
Main Methods:
- Online survey (Amazon Mechanical Turk) of over 500 families with children aged 1-4 years.
- Data collected on children's prosocial tendencies, chore participation, helpfulness of attempts, and motive attributions.
- Parental reports analyzed for age trends and gender differences (mothers vs. fathers).
Main Results:
- Parents reported increased prosocial behavior with age in young children.
- A majority of parents found their children's helping attempts to be unhelpful at times.
- Parental attributions of children's helping motives varied and changed with age; fathers' perceptions differed from mothers'.
Conclusions:
- Everyday helping, including unhelpful attempts, is a significant aspect of early prosocial development.
- Understanding children's everyday helping provides valuable data for theories on the origins of prosocial behavior.
- Parental perceptions and attributions offer nuanced insights into the development of helping behaviors in early childhood.
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