Because motivations for prosocial actions typically are unclear, sometimes even to actors but especially for observers, it is difficult to study prosocial motivation. This article reviews research that provides evidence regarding children's motives for prosocial behaviors. First, we present a heuristic model to classify motives on the dimension of…

Since Margaret Mead's field studies in the South Pacific a century ago, there has been the tacit understanding that as culture varies, so too must the socialization of children to become competent culture users and bearers. More recently, the work of anthropologists has been mined to find broader patterns that may be common to childhood across a…

An estimated 200 million children worldwide experience various forms of disability. This critical review extrapolates from existing literature in 2 distinct areas of scholarship: one on individuals with disabilities in disaster, and the other on children in disaster. The extant literature suggests that various factors may contribute to the…