Family Educational Background of the Pro-social Behavior in Children Aged 13/14 Years

Abstract

The pro-social behavior or altruism is of increasing interest to researchers in social and developmental psychology as one of the aspects of human behavior that facilitates social harmony in coping with the escalation of violence.

An interesting aspect from the point of view of the professional in mental health of education is to know what the prerequisites of pro-social behavior would be and specially the possibility of learning and training such behavior.

This paper want to contribute in answering these questions by presenting a fieldwork that tries to verify the possible differences between the behavior and family-educative antecedents of 87 children of high pro-social level and 87 children of low pro-social level. The subjects were extracted from a sample of 519 children aged 13/14 years.

The hypotheses arise from the author's former reviews on factors in pro- social behavior.

The results allow us to confirm, in general, a set of suggestions for a Pro-social Educative Profile