'Tis the season of giving – even for toddlers

As Christmas turns the focus to giving, a new University of Auckland study shows that helping others doesn’t just do good – it feels good, even for very young children.

A three-year project at the Early Learning Lab, Auckland (ELLA) followed more than 130 children from ages two to four, tracking their “prosocial” behaviours such as helping, comforting, and sharing, and associated emotions.

In staged scenarios, researchers observed whether and how quickly children helped by, say, picking up a dropped clothes peg, comforting a researcher who appeared cold or sad, or sharing a toy. Crucially, they also measured children’s emotional responses immediately afterwards.

One group stood out: the children who helped spontaneously showed the strongest displays of happiness.

“When they figured out what was needed and acted straight away, you could see the joy on their faces,” says Professor Annette Henderson, the director of the lab, which is in the School of Psychology. “It suggests that doing good for others is rewarding from a very young age.”

The highest levels of happiness were associated with spontaneous responses to emotionally demanding tasks, such as comforting someone in distress, as when a child provided a toy to a “sad” researcher.

The study is the first to track multiple forms of prosocial behavior and the positive emotions that follow across early childhood. The field of research is important because of the key roles that prosocial behaviours play in both the functioning of society and individual well-being.

“Humans are social beings who rely on care and reciprocity – the principle of giving back,“ says developmental psychologist Dr Sina Gibhardt, who co-led the project with Henderson. “As we approach Christmas – a time when giving and caring for others is front and centre – it’s a wonderful reminder that even very young children experience joy through helping.”

Helping children to discover this joy “may be one of the most meaningful gifts we can give them,” she says.

One surprising finding in the study was that the presence of parents influenced children's displays of happiness, says Henderson. In most sessions, parents remained outside the room, but some children needed a parent with them inside.

“These children were less likely to show happiness after helping compared to children whose parents were not in the room,” she says. “Children might be muting their expression of pride or positivity after helping in front of the people who most expect them to help.“

It is also possible that children help less when a parent is present because they assume that the parent will step in.

The study, which began with over 200 participants in year one, dropping to 161 in year two and 135 in year three, is titled 'Help and you shall be happy!: a longitudinal analysis of preschool-aged children’s happiness after prosocial action'.

It was published in Royal Society Open Science. Funding came from a Marsden Fast Start Grant and a Rutherford Discovery fellowship.