Helping infants to help: Cultural variation in maternal scaffolding and the development of prosocial behavior

Infants engage in a range of prosocial behaviors from a young age. Caregiver scaffolding, through encouragement and requests, plays a key role in shaping these early tendencies. However, how scaffolding practices vary with socialization goals across cultural contexts, and whether their effects on infant behavior are culturally specific, remains unanswered. In this study, we took a longitudinal, cross-cultural approach to examine variation in maternal socialization goals, scaffolding strategies, and infant helping at 16 and 22 months across three distinct sociocultural settings. A total of 273 infants participated in rural Uganda (n = 49; 24 females, 25 males), urban Uganda (n = 162; 76 females, 86 males), and in the United Kingdom (n = 62, 29 females, 33 males). We assessed maternal socialization goals via questionnaires, scaffolding strategies during a requested helping task, and infant prosocial behavior through both requested and spontaneous helping tasks. Scaffolding was more assertive in the Ugandan samples compared with those in the United Kingdom, where scaffolding was more deliberate. Maternal assertiveness positively predicted both spontaneous and requested helping at the individual level. However, at the group level, spontaneous helping rates were higher in Uganda than in the United Kingdom, whereas requested helping was higher in the United Kingdom than Uganda. These findings reveal important cross-cultural variation in how caregivers shape infant helping and point to a nuanced interplay between culturally specific caregiving practices and emerging prosocial behavior. Our study underscores the importance of examining both universal and context-specific pathways in the development of prosociality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).