Rui Li, Wenjuan Liu, YueqinHu
Child prosocial behavior is related to a series of adaptive outcomes and benefits both physical and mental health. This study proposes a motivational dynamic model to explain the longitudinal relationship among child school involvement, parental monitoring, and child prosocial behavior. This model hypothesizes that motivation is the key personal facilitator that drives children’s positive development, and that this personal facilitator also attracts social facilitators to promote child development. A three-wave longitudinal data among 4691 children with the two-year time interval was used to test the model. By sequentially constructing a parallel process latent growth model, a cross-lagged panel model, and a random intercept cross-lagged panel model, we identify the longitudinal interplay among these three variables. The results show that child school involvement as an external manifestation of motivation positively predicts child prosocial behavior, and it also indirectly promotes child prosocial behavior through increasing parental monitoring. These results support the motivational dynamic model, and provide implications for how to promote prosocial behavior in children.
