Infant helping in the first year of life: Parents' recollection of infants' earliest prosocial behaviors

- Helping may emerge early in the first year of life.
- Infants' earliest helping occurs in the context of care and self-care tasks.
- Later helping occurs in the context of routines and chores.

Prosocial behavior is widely thought to emerge early in the second year of life. This paper presents evidence that helping emerges early in the first year of life. Parents of 80 children asked to recollect the earliest instance of their child helping recalled help in two contexts: chores (e.g., cleaning up) and care and self-care (e.g., feeding and dressing). A subset of parents recalled helping even before eight months of age, most often in the context of self-care tasks. The presence of helping this early in the lifespan is situated in recent research, and its implications for current theories of early prosocial behavior are discussed.