It’s Mealtime! Maternal Structuring of Toddlers’ Prosocial Contributions in Kichwa Indigenous and Urban German Families

At 2 years of age, children around the world are eager to help adults. Later, however, children’s helping motivations take different developmental paths: Whereas Western children often resist contributing to housework, in many Indigenous Latin American societies older children contribute on their own initiative. To better understand the early origins of these cross-cultural differences, we video-taped and analyzed 2.5-year-olds’ ( N = 69) helping and maternal structuring during mealtime preparation in Kichwa Indigenous (KI) families in an Andean rural context (Cotacachi, Ecuador) and in Münster middle-class (MMC) families, an urban Western context in Germany. Unexpectedly, MMC children showed more helping than KI children, who participated more by observing. MMC mothers provided more structuring, including more requests, that were also more likely to be formulated as questions and in a less assertive manner, and they were more controlling while children helped than KI mothers. Furthermore, although acknowledging children’s helping to similar degrees, KI mothers more often thanked children and used relational praise (emphasizing children’s sense of community), while MMC mothers more often used autonomous praise (emphasizing children’s capacities). Overall, these findings suggest that children’s eagerness to help is transformed through the culture-specific ways in which helping opportunities are structured.