Does your baby put his arms through his sleeves when you dress him? Does your toddler pick up dropped shorts when you sort the laundry? These are examples of how toddlers can be helped by participating in shared activities. As infants reach their first birthday, helping becomes apparent in the context of sharing chores and interactions with caregivers, and fetching objects that are out of reach of unfamiliar adults.
Researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in Munich, Germany, aimed to address this issue by investigating how infants’ helping behavior is related to motor development, social-cognitive skills, and early interactions with caregivers.
Researchers surveyed 118 caregivers (mothers) and their infants (49 women and 69 men) when their infants were 6, 10, and 14 months old.
Sample size varied between measurement points because family members moved or were temporarily unreachable. Children were recruited from local birth records in European cities, and families were predominantly middle class. Participating mothers were required to have sufficient language skills, and it was essential that their infants develop normally at 6 months and be born at term. This study focused on the relationship between the primary caregiver and the infant, and in most cases this person was the mother. In line with German data collection policy guidelines, race and ethnicity data were not assessed.
The researchers assessed the interactions of participating caregivers with their babies during free play interactions. Motor development was accessed through parent report, and infants’ social understanding was examined using an eye-tracking task. Researchers analyzed infants’ helping behavior toward experimenters (such as helping to pick up items that fell off a tray) and sharing household chores with their caregivers (such as folding clothes or putting books on a shelf).
This study shows that infants learn to help through daily interactions with their caregivers. Specifically, the more the caregiver modeled the desired behavior, the more infants helped the caregiver. This study shows that there is an association between maternal modeling and providing assistance to the mother but not to the experimenter.
This study is consistent with the theory that infants learn to help others by participating in interactive daily life with their caregivers, which is influenced by their motor skills. This highlights that early assistance is partially facilitated by concrete, situational behavioral cues. The results also highlight that early helping behaviors are shaped by caregiver-child interactions and are intertwined with both motor and social development.
This research is featured in a new journal child development Paper by Natalie Klitner, Marina Kammermeyer, Anja Kasekker, and Markus Paulus from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Munich, Germany: “Developmental pathways of young children’s helping towards caregivers and unfamiliar adults: A longitudinal study.”
The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) had the opportunity to speak with the author team to learn more about the study.
SRCD: Were there any surprises in the results?
Author team: One result that surprised us was how infants’ helping behaviors toward caregivers and toward strangers were related to different abilities and interactional experiences. For example, caregiver modeling of helping behaviors was associated with helping caregivers but not directly with helping strangers. This indicates that caregiver assistance is primarily guided by specific behavioral cues that children encounter in specific assistance situations. In contrast, helping a stranger is more associated with young children’s ability to understand the goals of others and their experience of being responsive to their own needs.
SRCD: What does this tell us about prosocial behavior?
Author team: Helping can be considered a prosocial behavior given that it benefits others. In that sense, this study shows that prosocial behavior is shaped by early social interaction patterns and individual abilities such as motor development and social cognition. The study further shows that although infants show a tendency to behave prosocially toward caregivers and strangers, their behavior is also shaped by the specific recipient. This means that young children tap into different abilities depending on who they interact with in beneficial ways.
SRCD: Can you explain how this research will benefit families, early childhood educators, and researchers?
Author team: This study sheds light on infant competencies and parenting practices related to infant helping behavior and, therefore, may be important for supporting helping behavior from an early age. This study suggests that families and early childhood educators may be able to support infants’ tendency to help others by involving them in common routines, showing them how to help, and responding appropriately to their expressed needs. For researchers, this study advances our understanding of the early development of helping behavior by testing central theoretical claims and paves the way for future research.
SRCD: What are some limitations of the study?
Author team: One limitation of the current study is that helping toward caregivers and helping toward strangers were assessed at the same age. Further longitudinal research will be needed to better understand how support for different recipients evolves over time. In addition, we also studied laboratory support. Although this allows us to standardize conditions across participants, it does not allow us to fully capture the range of support opportunities that children encounter at home.
SRCD: What do you recommend for future research in this area?
Author team: An interesting next step would be to study more closely how helping behavior in everyday naturalistic settings, as assessed in the current study, is related to helping behavior observed in laboratory situations. Additionally, it would be interesting to investigate which pathways support a broader range of other forms of helping and prosocial behaviors, such as emotional helping and sharing. The association between caregiver interaction quality, specific scaffolding behaviors, and social understanding may differ depending on the type of prosocial behavior.
This research was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
sauce:
Child Development Research Group
Reference magazines:
DOI: 10.1093/chidev/aacag022
