Keep playing or start helping? Young children’s and parents’ judgments about prosocial acts at home

• In Event: Prosocial = good? Children’s developing evaluations of prosocial actions

Abstract

Young children encounter daily opportunities to help at home (Dahl, 2015). These encounters enable children to learn about how helping affects both others and themselves: While parents sometimes want their children’s help, young children who try to help can also get in the way (Hammond & Brownell, 2018; Rheingold, 1982). For their own part, children will enjoy some kinds of helping and dislike others. By middle childhood, considerations about how an act of helping affects the recipient and helper guides children’s judgments about whether helping is good, required, or bad (Killen & Turiel, 1998; Miller et al., 1990). For preschoolers who are starting to form such views, however, integrating multiple considerations into a judgment is often difficult (Dahl et al., 2020). Given the challenge of integrating these considerations, caregivers may play a crucial role in scaffolding children’s reasoning and judgments about when to help others (Drummond et al., 2014; see Hastings et al., 2015).

The present research investigated whether and how children and their parents balance the interests of helpers and recipients when evaluating acts of helping. We hypothesized that (1) children and parents weigh the interests of both helpers and recipients when evaluating acts of helping, (2) that caregivers weigh these factors more heavily, and hence make more discerning evaluations, and that (3) parent-child conversations about helping at home predict children’s judgments.

The study recruited U.S. 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 71, 52% girls, 48% boys) and their parents. Children and parents responded to hypothetical vignettes that presented a protagonist child with a choice between helping a parent or continuing an alternative activity. Vignettes varied in whether the protagonist child and recipient parent wanted the help to happen. Parent-child dyads also read and discussed a virtual storybook about a character helping around the house. In response to the vignettes, both children and parents were more likely to judge that the protagonist should help when the protagonist wanted to help and the hypothetical parent wanted the child to help, ps<.001. However, parents were more discerning than children in their judgments, as evidenced by two-way interactions between participant group and both protagonist interest and helping type (Figure 1). Specifically, parents were more attuned than children to the protagonist’s interest in helping, D(1)=60.56, p<.001, and to the type of helping task D(3)=20.53, p<.001. Older children were more likely than younger children to say the protagonist should help, D(1)=4.03, p=.045, and boys were more likely than girls to judge that they should help, D(1)=4.52, p=.034. Judgment justifications referenced the protagonist’s and parents’ interests, and pragmatic reasons (Table 1). The presentation will also include analyses of how parent-child conversations predict children’s judgments.

The study evidences how young children’s nuanced judgments about prosocial actions incorporate both helper and recipient interests. It also sheds light on the role of parents in the development of children’s views about how to balance helper and recipient interests in judgments and decisions about whether to help at home.

Authors

• Marie Grace S. Martinez, University of California - Santa Cruz
  Presenting Author

• Audun Dahl, University of California - Santa Cruz