The unintended negative consequences of help in childhood

Jellie Sierksma; Kristin Shutts

doi:10.1177/09637214251323594

The unintended negative consequences of help in childhood

Jellie Sierksma^*
, Kristin Shutts

^*Corresponding author for this work

Chair Thomaes

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

Exchanges of help in childhood produce many positive consequences, such as increasing academic success, promoting happiness, and fostering positive peer relations. For this reason, caretakers encourage helping behavior early in life, and schools implement intervention programs to nurture children’s prosociality. An often overlooked issue, however, is that providing and receiving help do not always produce positive outcomes. We review the latest research that converges to suggest that when children receive, witness, or provide help there can be unintended negative consequences—for example, receiving help can produce feelings of incompetence. We also grapple with how to balance the negative and positive outcomes of helping behavior, with an eye toward promoting children’s well-being and social cohesion in society.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	247-252
Number of pages	6
Journal	Current Directions in Psychological Science
Volume	34
Issue number	4
Early online date	15 Apr 2025
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214251323594
Publication status	Published - Aug 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Funding

This work was supported by Dutch Research Council Talent Programme Veni Grant VI.Veni.191G.052 (to J. Sierksma), National Science Foundation Grant 1941756 (to K. Shutts), and National Institutes of Health Grant R01-HD106970. (to K. Shutts). We would like to thank Katharine Scott for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. This work was supported by Dutch Research Council Talent Programme Veni Grant VI.Veni.191G.052 (to J. Sierksma), National Science Foundation Grant 1941756 (to K. Shutts), and National Institutes of Health Grant R01-HD106970. (to K. Shutts).

Funders	Funder number
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
National Science Foundation	1941756
National Institutes of Health	R01-HD106970

Keywords

development
helping
inequality
prosocial behavior
stereotypes

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sierksma-shutts-2025-the-unintended-negative-consequences-of-help-in-childhoodFinal published version, 151 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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The unintended negative consequences of help in childhood

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

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