Maternal Socialisation and Infant Helping in Uganda and the UK

Prosocial behaviour, including instrumental helping, emerges early in development, but the role parental attitudes and practices take in shaping the emergence of early helping across different cultural contexts is not well understood. We took a longitudinal approach to investigate maternal socialisation of early helping across two different cultural groups. Participants were mother-infant dyads from urban/sub-urban York, UK (43 infants: 21 female, 22 male) and the rural Masindi District, Uganda (39 infants: 22 female, 17 male). We examined cultural variation in mother's helping-related parenting practices towards 14- and 18-month-olds and infants' actual helping in experimental tasks at 18 months. We then asked whether maternal parenting practices and socialisation goals predicted individual variation in infant helping. We found that UK mothers scaffolded infant helping using a larger range of strategies than Ugandan mothers, but expecting an infant to help was more common in Uganda than in the UK. Moreover, we found that the Ugandan infants were more likely and often quicker to help an adult in need than the UK infants. Finally, we found that maternal scaffolding behaviours positively predicted individual variation in infant helping at 18 months in the UK, but not in Uganda. In contrast, maternal alignment with relational socialisation goals at 11 months positively predicted infant helping at 18 months in the Ugandan but not in the UK sample. These results indicate that early instrumental helping behaviour varies across societies and that maternal socialisation goals and scaffolding behaviours can shape infant helping in culturally-specific ways.