How to Raise a Helpful Child

As parents, we all want to raise children who are emotionally intelligent and good decision makers. We want to have kids with character. So much of our focus is on our child’s identity, rather than her actions. But what if we spoke to them in such a way that didn’t equate their characteristics with who they are? Marjorie Rhodes, Ph.D. explores the effect language has on our children, particularly in terms of developing helpfulness.

On a recent evening, my five-year-old was helping me set the table for dinner. After we wiped down the table and set out drinks, he ran to bring the placemats. He slid one across the table a little over-enthusiastically—knocking over his brother’s just-filled cup and spilling milk all over the table and onto the floor.

His eyes filled with the look of frustration, self-doubt, and sadness that children often have when they try to help, but end up making things harder. I took a deep breath and wondered what would happen next—would he keep it together and help wipe up the mess or run crying from the scene?

Recent research from my developmental psychology laboratory at New York University illustrates one way that parents may, in fact, have some control over the ending of stories like these.

Led by my doctoral student, Emily Foster-Hanson, our findings suggest that children’s behavior in these situations depends in part on subtle features of language. We found that children who were asked simply “to help” had more persistence after setbacks than children who were asked to “be helpers”.

Asking children to “be helpers” asks them to take on membership in a special category—to make being helpful part of who they are. While this might sound motivating, our studies, recently published in Child Development, found that this language also raises the stakes.

Category labels lead children to think of boundaries—to assume that someone is either in or out of a group. This means that talking to children about “helpers” brings to mind that some people are “not helpers” too.

Thinking of who can help in these categorical terms could be problematic once children experience difficulties, such as when they spill milk on the floor while trying to set the table (or drop a pile of recently folded laundry while trying to put it away, or knock over a box of toys while trying to pick up them up, or….). Could these experiences lead children to conclude that they lack the capacity to be in the “helper” group?