Children’s Contributions in Family Work: Two Cultural Paradigms

Beyond Behavior: Linguistic Evidence of Cultural Variation in Parental Ethnotheories of Children’s Prosocial Helping

“…These finding suggest that middleclass European-American mothers may assume that children's development of prosocial helping originates with mothers' efforts to cultivate helpful dispositions through organizing, managing, and controlling children's participation in everyday household work (see Lareau, 2000). Such parent-controlled approaches to socializing children's prosocial helping may be common to middle-class European-American families (Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik, 2013;Coppens et al, 2016), despite the voluntariness of children's early efforts to get involved. Similarly, the linguistic features of several middle-class European-American mothers' reports indicated doubt regarding children's helpful intentions when getting involved with everyday household tasks (see Figure 1C).…”

“…The mother suggests that, in due course, developmentally, children motivate themselves to help with increasingly sophisticated contributions -the family and cultural expectation that children contribute is "in place, " and children are given space to exercise agency in starting to help. The ethnotheoretical assumption presented here is that assigning household work to children, a practice common in middle-class European-heritage communities (Goodnow, 1988;Goodnow and Delaney, 1989;Klein and Goodwin, 2013;Gaskins, 2015;Coppens et al, 2016), is both unnecessary and may conflict with an agency-centered emphasis on children learning to motivate themselves.…”

“…For example, recent laboratory-based research has found that children younger than age 2 can help voluntarily and that requests for their assistance or incentives may undermine how and whether they help (Warneken and Tomasello, 2008, 2014Hepach et al, 2012). Yet, middle-class Europeanheritage families commonly use incentives, requests, and task assignments at younger ages (Dahl, 2015; see also Waugh et al, 2015) and at older ages when middle-class children in various communities help both minimally and reluctantly (Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik, 2013;Coppens et al, 2016). What views, assumptions, and cultural values guide the deployment of these socialization practices when they may be unnecessary or even counterproductive to children's prosocial development?…”

“…Cultural perspectives in research on children's helping emphasize the embeddedness of children's prosocial development in the cultural values and socialization practices of their families and communities (e.g., Giner Torréns and , a need to consider forces in play at both the "roots" (i.e., developmental origins) and "branches" (i.e., developmental trajectories) of children's prosocial development (Hay, 2009). Evidence of striking cultural differences in older children's prosocial helpfulness (e.g., Ochs and Izquierdo, 2009;Alcalá et al, 2014;Coppens et al, 2016) suggests that cultural values and socialization practices are important for young children's prosocial development and vary considerably across communities.…”

“…Development of intelligence or "understanding" -na'at in Maya -is described as "remembering their responsibility." Although expectations of responsibility are common among indigenous-heritage communities of the Americas, contingent assignment of chores or other responsibilities is rare (Coppens et al, 2016). "Too much teaching" is viewed as inefficient and motivationally distracting for socializing children's contributions (de Haan, 1999; see also Gaskins, 1999a;Cervera, 2016).…”