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Abstract

When solving everyday problems, humans rely on a critical skill: help-seeking. Starting in the first years of life, children learn to use others’ capabilities to accomplish their goals, such as reaching distant objects, opening difficult containers, and activating toys. How does this skill emerge across developmental time – what do help-seeking bids look like at different ages, how often do children make bids for help, and to what degree are children being strategic in their help-seeking? Additionally, what skills support help-seeking? Effective help-seeking requires a desire to solve problems, metacognitive understanding of one’s own needs, communicative skill, and willingness and ability to interact with others. Might skills in areas theoretically important for help-seeking – communication, executive functioning, social cognition, mastery motivation, and temperament – relate to help-seeking at different ages? I address these questions across three studies. In Chapter 1, I review the existing help-seeking literature and pose the open questions described above. In Chapter 2, as part of a larger longitudinal study, 18-month-olds were presented with an in-lab problem-solving task and spontaneously produced bids for help. Children were sensitive to problem difficulty, producing more bids for help as the task became more challenging. Help-seeking rate positively related to vocabulary size, and problem-solving strategy related to children’s executive functioning. In Chapter 3, children’s propensity to seek help during easy and challenging activities was rated by parents in a novel assessment. Children asked for help significantly more during challenging activities as opposed to easy ones. Parent-reported rate of help-seeking was negatively related to Theory of Mind and prosociality – children who were more helpful and better at understanding others’ perspectives were less likely to seek help overall. Strategic use of help-seeking was positively related to ToM, prosociality, and mastery motivation – children who were better at taking others’ perspectives, who were more prosocial, and who enjoyed solving problems tended to mostly ask for help only when it was necessary. In Chapter 4, children’s spontaneous, in-home help-seeking was evaluated by coding bids for help from the same cohort of children at three ages: 14, 38, and 58 months. Help-seeking behavior changed with age, with rate peaking at three years and strategy peaking at 14 months. Rate at three years also related to vocabulary size – three-year-olds with larger vocabularies were more likely to ask for help than peers with smaller vocabularies. On average, bids received high ratings from coders judging how necessary bids were; children tended to ask for help when it was truly necessary. In Chapter 5, I review the findings from all three studies and posit questions for future research. Across three studies, I find evidence that children adapt their help-seeking to problem difficulty, and that different aspects of help-seeking – rate and strategy, among others I explore – are largely distinct from each other and relate to different skills. The emergence of help-seeking behavior is explored in detail and with a variety of methodologies.

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