Parents are always trying to influence what their child becomes. One way to study that is to examine what aspects of parental behavior and attitude are related to the child's behavior. The current study examined the relationship of the following variables with young children's prosocial behavior: age, sibling status, family income, and parental education, parental altruistic behavior, parental affiliative tendency, and parental socialization goals. The "family experience" variables were collected using The Family Experiences Questionnaire which was adapted from the work of Keller (2007), Mehrabian (1972), and Smith (2005). Children's prosocial behavior was assessed through a series of in-lab sharing tasks, involving "low-cost" sharing, in which the child could give just one item out of a group of items to share with a distressed adult who had nothing to play with. Results indicated the following: 1) As age increased, children were more likely to share toys and food, and they also shared their toys and food sooner in a sequence of communicative cues; 2) there were no significant differences in sharing between children with and children without siblings; 3) as family income rose, younger children were less likely to share food; 4) as parent education rose, all children shared toys more frequently but not food; 5) as parental altruism rose, younger children shared food more frequently; 6) as parental affiliative tendency rose, older children shared both toys and food less frequently; 7) as parental other-orientation socialization goals rose, older children shared food immediately at higher rates (very strong positive correlation); 8) as parental obedience goals rose, younger children shared food less frequently. Together, the results show that there are multiple family-based correlates of early prosocial behavior and that those vary by the child's age and what must be shared.
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