Socialization of Early Prosocial Behavior by Brownell - Essay Example

Parenting styles such as secure attachment, responsiveness to distress, and warmth are positively related to children’s prosocial behaviors; however, these authors have failed to find considerable relations between these two constructs.

Although our understanding of the relationship between social, for example, parent socialization, and knowledge, for example, temperament, has significantly increased over the past three decades, Brownell and co-researchers suggest that we should also consider conceptual models, which assess how the environment differentially influences an individual’s behavior over parsimonious models, which only consider the principle effects of these influences. For instance, these authors established that children who share and help quickly, particularly in tasks that require more complex emotional understanding, came from families where parents often asked them to explain and label the emotions they depicted from the books (Brownell et al. 2013). This is an indication that it is the parents’ influence on their children’s emotions that affect their prosocial behaviors, other than the parents’ own explanations and production of emotional labels. I, therefore, agree with the authors that it is the quality, but not the quantity of parents’ talk about emotions with their children, that has positive effects on their children’s early prosocial behavior.