Socializing Prosociality: The Relationship Between Parental Practices, Cultural Model and Child Temperament

Authors

Flavia L. Medrea¹, Ionuț-Sergiu Mone^1*, Oana Benga¹

¹ Department of Psychology, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Abstract

Parents play an important role in fostering children’s prosocial behavior development, but predictors of specific parental practices that promote prosociality have rarely been investigated in the literature. Based on the framework of the lifeworld approach (Kärtner & Köster, 2024), the present study aims to examine parents’ cultural model, reflected by their self-construal and values as a potential predictor of specific parental prosocial socialization practices, namely awareness of internal mental states, contingency and scaffolding, while controlling for child temperament. Participants were 100 parents of preschool children who self-reported on each of the variables examined. Results showed different predictors for each type of prosociality-enhancing parenting practice. Parental awareness of internal mental states was significantly predicted by universalism-tolerance value and marginally by child temperamental inhibitory control. For parental contingency and parental global prosocial socialization practices, respectively, child temperament predicted parental practices over and above parental cultural model. More specifically, the child temperament traits of fearfulness, sadness, and potentially inhibitory control positively predicted parental contingency, whereas the traits of fearfulness and inhibitory control positively predicted parental global prosocial socialization. The results emphasize dynamic interactions between the child and caregiver subsystems in the context of prosocial development.

Keywords: parental practices, prosociality, cultural model, self-construal, values

PAGES:83-114

doi:10.24193/cbb.2025.29.05

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