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Parental Mind-Mindedness and Children’s Helping Behaviour

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Dissertation(351.8 KB)

Date

2022

Authors

Supervisor

Ying , Wang
Landhuis, Erik

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Degree name

Bachelor of Health Science (Honours)

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Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

Prosocial behaviour in children is related to many positive outcomes in the social and educational domains. Therefore, it has been of interest to researchers to study the antecedents of these behaviours. This research project examines the relationship between parental mind-mindedness and children’s helping behaviours, exploring whether mind-mindedness could be an antecedent. Parental mind-mindedness has been found to relate to children’s social competence development, such as acceptance and interactions with school-aged peers. However, few studies have looked at mind- mindedness in relation to early developing prosocial behaviour. This study hypothesized that mind- mindedness would be positively associated with toddler’s prosocial actions as measured by their readiness to help an experimenter in need. One hundred and eighty-four parent-child dyads were assessed for parental mind-mindedness and helpful behaviour on helping tasks ranging in difficulty. The results showed that the relationship between mind-mindedness and children’s behaviour on simple helping tasks was weakly, but statistically significantly correlated. However, this association went away after controlling for parental verbosity. Mind-mindedness was unrelated to children’s performance on more difficult helping tasks. These findings were not aligned with the expectation. Reasons why were outlined and future recommendations were made to examine the relationship between children’s developing prosocial behaviour and the role that parental behaviour and language, such as mind-mindedness might play.

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https://hdl.handle.net/10292/15967

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Bachelor with Honours Dissertations - open access