Helping

I recently read an article about how children come into the world with a natural desire to be helpful. This is what was said:

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology discovered that toddlers as young as 18 months already have full-fledged qualities of altruism and cooperation. The way they demonstrated this was simple. A researcher would "struggle" to hang up a towel with a clothespin or stack up a pile of books. When he dropped the clothespin or tipped the books over, the toddlers would race to pick up the clothespin and hand it back, or restack the books. But when the researcher made the same mistakes without struggling — that is, without looking like he needed help — the toddlers didn't budge. They understood what it meant to be helpful.

As I was folding the laundry the other day I saw this idea in practice. I dropped a few socks as I was folding and Jay quickly ran over, picked them up and handed them to me while saying, "dae due" (translation: thank you). What a sweet little boy. I also caught him "helping" me put the laundry into the washing machine. No matter that it was already clean :) It's so fun to see the beautiful people children are.