Competence-based helping: Children's consideration of need when providing others with help

The effects of maternal competence and situational stress level on children's help-seeking expectations across 4 to 6 years of age

Help-seeking is a crucial problem-solving strategy for young children. However, it is not yet clear how children weigh different cues to make help-seeking decisions across preschool years, especially in caregiver-child interactions. The current study used a social expectation task to examine the effects of maternal competence and situational stress level on 4- to 6-year-old children's help-seeking expectations from a third-party perspective. Children's expectations of whether to seek help were measured. A total fo 135 Han Chinese children aged 4 to 6 years from an eastern city of China participated in this study. We found that 4- to 6-year-olds expected to seek more help from a competent mother than from an incompetent mother in low-stress conditions. When the stress level was high, however, they expected to seek help regardless of maternal competence levels. These results suggest that the interaction between the situational stress level and maternal competence determines young children's help-seeking expectations across preschool years. They further suggest that young children seek help from mothers in an active and discriminatory way.

The roots of compassion in early childhood: Relationships between theory of mind and attachment representations with empathic concern and prosocial behavior

This study focused on attachment representations and theory of mind as potential developmental origins of individual differences in preschoolers' peer- and adult-directed empathic concern and prosocial behavior. In two experiments, 3- to 6-year-olds were exposed to either a high-distressed or low-distressed adult or child using a laboratory setting (Experiment 1; N = 263) or hypothetical vignettes (Experiment 2; N = 202). Self-reported and coded expressions of empathic concern and prosocial behaviors were used as early indicators of compassion. The findings indicated that children expressed more empathic concern and engaged in more prosocial behavior in the high-distress condition than in the low-distress condition. Children's empathic concern and prosocial behavior increased with age. Secure attachment and theory of mind abilities played significant moderating roles in the association between distress conditions and empathic concern. Children with more advanced theory of mind abilities and secure attachment were better at recognizing the concerns of distressed peers or adults and showed significantly more empathic concern. Resistant and disorganized children exhibited more self-distress in response to others' distress. The implications for early interventions directed at increasing empathic concern and prosocial behavior are discussed.

Children perpetuate competence-based inequality when they help peers

Exchanges of help between children are common and often have positive consequences. But not all help is equally beneficial, for example because some help does not provide an opportunity to practice and develop skills. Here I examine whether young children might perpetuate competence-based inequality by providing incompetent peers with less opportunity to practice and improve their skills compared to competent peers. Study 1 (N = 253, 6-9 years) shows that young children understand not all help is equally beneficial: Children think that peers who receive empowerment (hints) vs. non-empowerment (correct answers) help can learn more. Study 2 (N = 80) and 3 (N = 41) then assessed children's (7-9 years) actual helping behavior in a lab-based experiment. Through a cover story, participants were introduced to two unknown, same-age children whom they later overheard were either good or not good at solving puzzles (Study 2) or math (Study 3). Subsequently, participants got to help both of them with a puzzle-quiz (Study 2) or a math-quiz (Study 3) by providing either empowerment or non-empowerment when they asked for help. Across both studies, children were more likely to provide empowerment help to competent peers, and non-empowerment help to incompetent peers. This work suggests that when young children perceive differences in competence (e.g., based on stereotypes), they contribute to maintaining the status quo by providing the most vulnerable students, that would profit the most from improving their skills, less opportunity to do so.

Give and take: A microgenetic study of preschoolers' deceptive and prosocial behavior in relation to their socio-cognitive development

Early on, young children begin to learn the social skills which will help them navigate through an increasingly complex social world. We explored how deceiving for personal gain potentially interacts with sharing the resulting resources and how they both relate to theory of mind (ToM) and inhibitory control in 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 92, 43 girls). Children played a hide-and-seek zero-sum game in which they could win stickers if they discovered how to deceive the experimenter. Then they were prompted to share their stickers in a dictator game paradigm. Using a microgenetic design, we tracked deceptive behavior across ten sessions and sharing behavior across five of these sessions, plus a follow-up session 15 months later. Children polarized into a group who never deceived across all sessions, and a group who constantly deceived above chance levels (around 85 % of the time). Sharing behavior was extremely low (under 6 % of stickers) across the sessions. At follow-up, deceptive behavior was above 80 %, while sharing remained at a low level (under 5 %). The novelty of our findings was that children who initially discovered how to deceive shared less than the children who didn't use this deceptive strategy. Nonetheless, this pattern was reversed at follow-up. Furthermore, ToM positively predicted deceptive behavior across all sessions and improved after the microgenetic sessions but wasn't related with deception at follow-up. Implications for enabling children to deploy the growing understanding of their worlds in a more prosocial way are discussed.