Do Emerging Adults Learn What They Live? The Frequency and Importance of Childhood Family Faith Activities on Emerging Adults’ Prosocial Behavior Toward Family, Friends, and Strangers

Abstract

Since most religions emphasize helping others and childhood family experiences contribute to emerging adults’ behavior, we explored how childhood family religious socialization was related to future emerging adults’ self-reported prosocial behavior after accounting for their current self-reported prosocial behavior. Specifically, we investigated the extent to which emerging adults’ (NT1=551) retrospective views of how frequent (FAITHS-Freq) and important (FAITHS-Importance) their childhood family faith activities were related to their future self-reported prosocial behavior toward family (PBFa), friends (PBFr) and strangers (PBSt) one year later (T2). After accounting for PB-T1 behaviors, FAITHS-frequency T1 significantly predicted T2 self-reported prosocial behavior towards strangers (PBSt), but not future (T2) PBFa or PBFr. The same pattern emerged for FAITHS-importance T1: after accounting for T1 PBs, it was only a significant predictor of T2 PBSt. Thus, for emerging adults both FAITHS-frequency and importance appear to contribute to self-perceptions as helpful toward unfamiliar others in emerging adulthood.