When you dress your baby, does he put his hands in his sleeves? Does your child pick up the shorts you dropped while you clean the laundry? These are examples of how infants help by participating in shared activities. As infants approach their first birthday, helping becomes evident in terms of shared tasks and interactive routines with their caregivers or retrieving an object out of reach from an unfamiliar adult.
Researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Munich, Germany aimed to address this by examining how infants’ helping behavior is linked to motor development and social-cognitive skills, as well as their early interactions with their caregiver.
Researchers studied 118 caregivers (mothers) and their infants (49 women and 69 men) at six months, 10 months and 14 months of age.
Sample sizes varied across measurement points because families moved away or were temporarily unavailable. Children were recruited from local birth records in a European city, and families were predominantly middle class. Participating mothers were required to have adequate language skills, and their six-month-old infants were required to develop normally and be born at full term. The study focused on the relationship between the primary caregiver and infants and in most cases this person was the mother. In line with German data collection policy guidelines, race and ethnicity data were not evaluated.
Researchers assessed caregivers’ interactions with their children as they participated in a free play interaction. Motor development was accessible through parent report and infants’ social understanding was examined using an eye-tracking task. The researchers analyzed infants’ helpful behavior toward an experimenter (such as helping pick up fallen objects from a tray) and sharing tasks with their caregiver (such as folding clothes or putting books on a shelf).
Studies show that infants learn to help through everyday interactions with their caregivers. Specifically, the more caregivers modeled the required behavior, the more infants helped the caregiver. Studies show an association between maternal modeling and helping toward the mother but not helping toward the experimenter.
The study is consistent with the theory that infants help others by engaging in interactive routines with their caregiver, which are influenced by their motor skills. This underlines that initial helping is partly motivated by concrete, situational behavioral cues. The results also emphasize that early helping behavior is shaped by caregiver–infant interactions and is associated with both motor and social development.
The study is featured in a new child Development The article, “Developmental pathways of infant helping of caregivers and unfamiliar adults: A longitudinal study,” by Natalie Christner, Marina Kammerier, Anja Käsecker, and Markus Paulus from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Munich, Germany.
The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) had the opportunity to speak to the author team to learn more about the research.
SRCD: Did anything surprise you about the results?
Author Team: One result that surprised us was how infants’ helping behavior toward a caregiver and an unfamiliar person was related to different abilities and interaction experiences. For example, modeling of caregivers’ helping behavior was associated with helping the caregiver, but not directly helping a stranger. This indicates that caregiver helping is mostly guided by concrete behavioral cues that children encounter in a specific helping situation. Helping strangers, in contrast, is more linked to infants’ ability to understand others’ goals and their experiences of sensitive responses to their needs.
SRCD: What does it teach us about pro-social behavior?
Author Team: Helping can be considered a prosocial behavior, given that it benefits another person. In that sense, this research shows that prosocial behavior is shaped by early social interaction patterns and individual abilities, such as motor development and social cognition. The study further indicates that although infants show a general readiness to perform social behavior toward caregivers and unfamiliar individuals, their behavior is also shaped by the specific recipient. This means that infants acquire different abilities depending on who they are interacting with in a beneficial way.
SRCD: Can you explain how this research can help families, early childhood teachers, and researchers?
Author Team: This research highlights infant competencies and parenting practices that are associated with infants’ helping behavior, and therefore may be important for supporting helping behavior from an early age. For families and early childhood teachers, this research suggests that involving infants in shared routines, showing them how to help, and responding appropriately to their indicated needs may support infants’ tendency to help others. For researchers, this study advances understanding of the early development of helping behavior by testing central theoretical claims and opens avenues for future research.
SRCD: What are some limitations of the research?
Author Team: A limitation of the present study is that caregiving and helping a stranger were assessed at the same age. Further longitudinal research will be needed to better understand how help directed to different recipients evolves over time. Furthermore, we have studied help in a laboratory context. Although this allows for standardized conditions across participants, it cannot fully capture the range of helping opportunities children receive at home.
SRCD: What do you recommend for future research in this area?
Author Team: An interesting next step is to study more closely how helping behavior in everyday natural settings relates to helping behavior observed in the laboratory context, as assessed in the present study. Additionally, it would be interesting to examine which pathways more broadly support other forms of helping and social behavior, including emotional helping and sharing. The quality of caregivers’ interactions, concrete scaffolding behavior, and the relevance of social understanding probably vary across different types of social behavior.
This research was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
