The influence of socialization goals and practices on the development of prosocial behavior in the toddler years: A cross-cultural study
Final Report Abstract
The overarching goal of this longitudinal, cross-cultural study was to analyze the influence of caretakers’ socialization goals and practices on their toddlers’ prosocial behavior. We differentiated between three domains of prosocial behavior (i.e., helping, comforting, and cooperation) and contrasted the socialization thereof in families from a prototypical autonomous sociocultural context (urban middle-class families in Münster, Germany) with families from an autonomousrelational sociocultural context (middle-class families in Delhi, India) when toddlers were 18 months old. In addition, the same data were assessed again at 30 months in the Münster sample. The main findings were the following: First, in line with the current literature, the data show that the domains of prosocial behavior (i) increase from 18 to 30 months and (ii) show low to moderate associations across domains and time. These findings were not only based on behavioral data as previous studies, but were further supported by a large sample of maternal report data. Second, we found that 18month-olds from Delhi showed more helping than toddlers from Münster. Furthermore, Delhi mothers provided more opportunities to help, praised less, and used more punitive practices than mothers in Münster. These data supported one of the study’s main assumptions, namely that culture affects toddlers’ helping behavior from the time of emergence during the second year. Furthermore, it shows that the culture-specific conceptions of prosocial behavior influence which socialization practices parents use, which, in turn, may influence children’s motivation underlying early prosocial behavior. Third, and contrary to the hypotheses, the correlational data do not support the unidirectional link between parenting and child development. Rather, there were a number of counter-intuitive associations, which can be interpreted if one reverses the direction of effects. For example, the negative association between maternal provision of opportunities and toddlers’ helping might indicate that mothers provide more opportunities in order to compensate for the fact that their toddlers do help less than others. Meanwhile, there are first studies that have shown that depending on children’s age, influences of parenting on early prosocial development can be constitutive or compensatory. Based on these ideas and findings, we designed two follow-up studies that test these bidirectional associations between maternal socialization practices and toddlers’ prosocial behavior. In study one, we focus on the constitutive and compensatory function of maternal structuring based on behavioral data with a cross-lagged correlational design. In study two, we experimentally manipulate mothers’ representation of their toddler’s prosociality and test how this affects maternal structuring during collaborative engagements (e.g., clean-up tasks). Overall, the current study provides further evidence that, first, the emergence of prosocial behavior during the second year is co-constituted by social and socio-cultural aspects of children’s lifeworld. Second, it provides first evidence for the fact that mothers from different cultures capitalize on different motivational potentialities when socializing toddlers’ helping behavior (e.g., interpersonal obligation or personal choice). This has important implications for how the basic elements of prosociality are refined and further develop, especially for the kind(s) of motivation underlying prosocial behavior as development progresses.
Publications
- (2017). Psychometric properties of the early prosocial behavior questionnaire. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 14(5), 618-627
Giner Torréns, M., & Kärtner, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2016.1259107) - (2017). The influence of socialization on early helping from a cross-cultural perspective. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 48(3), 353368
Giner Torréns, M. & Kärtner, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022117690451) - Beyond dichotomies – (m)others’ structuring and the development of toddlers’ prosocial behavior across cultures. Current Opinion in Psychology
Kärtner, J.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.07.040)
