SOCIALIZING CONCERN FOR OTHERS IN THE HOME

Mothers of 4- and 7-year-olds recorded their children's spontaneous prosocial behavior, failure to be prosocial, and failure to comply with requests for prosocial behavior, as well as responses that the children received for these acts. Helping occurred more frequently than sharing and giving, affection and praise, or reassuring and protecting. Children were equally likely to receive no response, acknowledgment, social approval, and praise for spontaneous prosocial behavior, with all other responses (including discussion of the feelings of others and character attribution) occurring minimally. When children did not comply with requests for prosocial behavior, they were more likely to receive threats and nonverbal punishment than when they failed to be prosocial. Empathy training was the most frequently occurring response to failures of prosocial behavior and tended to be used more after these failures than after failures to comply. Four-year-olds whose prosocial behavior was most frequently followed by no response tended to be the most prosocial.