Infant helping in the first year of life: Parents’ recollection of infants’ earliest prosocial behaviors

•Helping may emerge early in the first year of life.•Infants’ earliest helping occurs in the context of care and self-care tasks.•Later helping occurs in the context of routines and chores. Prosocial behavior is widely thought to emerge early in the second year of life. This paper presents evidence...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInfant behavior & development Vol. 47; pp. 54 - 57
Main Authors Hammond, Stuart I., Al-Jbouri, Elizabeth, Edwards, Victoria, Feltham, Laura E.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Elsevier Inc 01.05.2017
Subjects
Child
Female
Helping Behavior
Humans
Infancy
Infant
Infant Behavior
Male
Mental Recall
Parents
Prosocial behavior
Self-care
Social Behavior
Surveys and Questionnaires
Self-care
Prosocial behavior
Infancy
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Summary:•Helping may emerge early in the first year of life.•Infants’ earliest helping occurs in the context of care and self-care tasks.•Later helping occurs in the context of routines and chores. Prosocial behavior is widely thought to emerge early in the second year of life. This paper presents evidence that helping emerges early in the first year of life. Parents of 80 children asked to recollect the earliest instance of their child helping recalled help in two contexts: chores (e.g., cleaning up) and care and self-care (e.g., feeding and dressing). A subset of parents recalled helping even before eight months of age, most often in the context of self-care tasks. The presence of helping this early in the lifespan is situated in recent research, and its implications for current theories of early prosocial behavior are discussed.
ISSN:0163-6383
1879-0453
1934-8800
DOI:10.1016/j.infbeh.2017.02.004