Parental presence and encouragement do not influence helping in young children
By Felix Warneken, Michael Tomasello. 2013
136 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Young children begin helping others with simple instrumental problems from soon after their first birthdays. In previous observations of this phenomenon, both naturalistic and experimental, children’s parents were in the room and could potentially have influenced their behavior. In the two current studies, we gave 24-month-old children the opportunity to help an unfamiliar adult obtain an out-of-reach object when the parent (or a friendly female adult) (i) was present but passive, (ii) was present and highlighted the problem for the child, (iii) was present and actively encouraged the child to help, (iv) was present and ordered the child to help, or (v) was absent from the room. The children helped at relatively high levels and equally under all these treatment conditions. There was also no differential effect of treatment condition on children’s helping in a subsequent test phase in which no parent was present, and children had to disengage from a fun activity to help. Young children’s helping behavior is not potentiated or facilitated by parental behavior in the immediate situation, suggesting that it is spontaneous and intrinsically motivated.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c334333b28ee4497d08ed504ab66fe1eefcbfa14
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In Clinical Psychology
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Precocious Prosociality: Why Do Young Children Help? (2015, background): “They help when their parents are absent, showing that neither obedience to parental authority nor parental cues drive their helping (9, 16).”
- “Who is worthy of my generosity?” Recipient characteristics and the development of children’s sharing (2016, unknown): “…to directly reciprocate a recipient’s past sharing or cooperation (House, Henrich, Sarnecka, & Silk, 2013; Levitt, Weber, Clark, & McDonnell, 1985; Warneken & Tomasello, 2013) and when recipients contributed substantial effort to a joint goal (Hamann, Warneken, Greenberg, & Tomasello, 2011;…”