Understanding the Relationship Between Parenting and Children's Prosocial Motivation

In this study the relation between parenting and the development of prosocial reasoning in children ages 9-13 years was examined. Domains of socialization (Grusec & Davidov, 2010) were used as the framework to categorize parent/child interactions and as the foundation to create two new measures, one to organize mothers’ endorsement of specific kinds of parent/child interactions, the other to organize the kinds of reasons children provide for prosocial behavior. Maternal and child Openness (John & Srivastava, 1999) were associated with parent/child interactions that are characterized by perspective taking and therefore likely to contribute to the development of a child’s internalized reasoning. There was a negative relation found between mother/child interactions that are likely to promote the development of internalized-reasoning (Deci & Ryan, 1989) and a child’s externally based prosocial motivation (Ryan & Connell, 1989). This suggests that specific types of interactions will lead to the development of internalized prosocial reasoning.MAS