Want a young child to 'help' or 'be a helper'? Choice of words matters
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - 11:33
in Psychology & Sociology
A new study has found that parent word choice matters when encouraging preschool-age children to help others. Children were significantly more likely to help an experimenter when he or she referred to help using nouns ('some children choose to be helpers') than when he or she referred to help using verbs ('some children choose to help'). The study looked at about 150 3- to 6- year-olds from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds.