You're Not Imagining It, Your Baby Is Trying To Help You

Children often take pride in being given a task—and even more pride in completing one. And according to new research published in Child Development, even babies can be a source of help from very early on.

If your baby straightens a leg so you can pull on their pants or grabs a piece of laundry off the floor while you’re folding clothes, you’re not imagining things. The study found that infants begin helping caregivers and unfamiliar adults in small but meaningful ways around their first birthday, and sometimes even earlier during daily care routines.

Researchers in Germany followed 118 caregiver-infant pairs when the babies were 6, 10 and 14 months old. They looked at caregiving practices, motor development and early social understanding, then observed how babies responded in simple helping situations like tidying books, picking up dropped objects and joining in with shared chores.

“Infants can help their parents in simple but meaningful ways from very early on,” said Natalie Christner, one of the study’s authors. “Early examples include assistance during daily care routines, such as moving their bodies in ways that make dressing easier. Later, they may begin to join in with household tasks, for instance, picking up clothes from the floor and handing them to a parent or retrieving a dropped pen.”

Babies who had more developed motor skills were more likely to help others. And the more caregivers modelled the required behaviour, the more infants helped that caregiver.

The researchers were looking at how early helping behaviour develops. “We wanted to better understand the developmental foundations of early helping behaviour,” Christner said. “Previous studies have often focused on some of these aspects in isolation, leaving open how they contribute together to helping behaviour and how they are interrelated.”

That doesn’t mean your baby is ready to unload the dishwasher. The helping in this study was early-stage stuff: handing something over, joining in during a routine or pitching in during a shared task. But it does suggest babies are learning a lot by being included in the everyday flow of family life.

“The study suggests that involving infants in shared routines and showing them how to help may encourage helping in concrete situations,” Christner said. “The study also points to the importance of responding appropriately to infants’ signalled needs, as these experiences may support infants’ tendency to help others.”

So the next time your little one wants to pitch in, it may be worth letting them try. It might make a simple chore take a little longer, but those tiny attempts to help are part of how babies begin learning to take part in family life.