So you told your kid you would come home from work with their favorite snack, but after a long day, the errand totally slipped your mind. You find yourself turning the door knob and scrambling to find an excuse that will appease a crestfallen child.
What you say next will determine how much empathy you'll get, according to a recent study from Duke University published in the journal Cognitive Development.
Children between ages 3 and 5 can discern which excuses are worthy of forgiveness and which are not. Excuses that involved helping another person were met with more understanding than excuses that seemed selfish.
For example, if your child asks why they can't have their favorite snack and you say you were helping a colleague finish an assignment and didn't have time to pick it up, that could be received better than "Because I said so."
A selfish excuse is as bad as no excuse at all
Researchers used puppets to conduct the experiment. Sixty-four children between the age of 3 and 5 were shown a series of videos where puppets promised to show them a cool toy, left the scene, and returned empty-handed.
The puppets then gave one of three responses: "I had to help a friend with his homework," "I wanted to watch TV," and no explanation at all.
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All children agreed it was wrong to break a promise. However, kids had less negative judgment toward those who offered the excuse of helping another compared to those who said they wanted to watch TV or had no excuse.
This shows that kids feel like prioritizing others is a more legitimate excuse than prioritizing yourself.
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"Previous research has suggested that in some cases, young kids will just take any reason to be better than no reason at all," Leon Li, one of the paper's authors, told Science Daily. "But here we showed that kids do pay attention to the actual content."
It also shows that certain morals can be set at an early age.
"Morality is a type of common ground that we have with others, with mutual expectations about how we should behave and what counts as good grounds for justification," Li told Science Daily. "We're showing that young children become attuned to this common ground at an early age."
A child's discontentment didn't color their view of the puppet itself. Children were not any less likely to invite the puppet to a playdate or say they "liked" the puppet, researchers found.
"Usually if someone breaks a promise and gives you a lame reason, it implies they're not really a good friend," Li told Science Daily. "Children this age don't make that connection. They're just not there yet."
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