Toddlers have a reputation for guarding their snacks. Yet a study in Developmental Science suggests that, emotionally, many of them enjoy doing the opposite. When asked to share treats, children under two years old showed more visible happiness than when they were simply given treats to eat themselves. The takeaway is bold but simple: giving can feel good early.
Generosity, earlier than we think
Human generosity shows up in every culture people have studied, from everyday food sharing to major sacrifices made for others. Researchers have long debated what powers that cooperation. One idea is the “warm glow” of helping: the act produces a pleasant feeling that makes us want to repeat it.
Testing that idea in toddlers is tricky. At this age, children work hard to read adults, follow rules, and earn approval. If a toddler smiles after being told to hand something over, that grin could reflect obedience rather than a real desire to give. Enda Tan and colleagues set out to untangle those possibilities by building a study where giving, receiving, watching, and “just follow directions” could be compared side by side.
A monkey, a table, and four choices
The research team recruited 134 healthy toddlers, ages 16.57 to 23.77 months. Each child sat on a caregiver’s lap facing a researcher across a table. Parents wore headphones and kept their eyes closed, reducing the chance that a nod, a smile, or a whispered hint would shape what the child did.
Next came the star of the session: a stuffed monkey puppet. The researcher explained that the monkey liked eating treats, such as graham crackers and small snack crackers. For a toddler, that framing matters; it turns sharing into a social moment, not a purely mechanical task.
The session began with straightforward receiving. Every toddler was given eight treats, establishing a baseline for how they looked when a reward came their way.
Then the experiment shifted into four brief scenarios, presented in random order. In one, the child performed giving that required a sacrifice: they handed over one of their own treats to the monkey. In another, giving was free: the researcher supplied a new treat and the toddler passed it along, keeping their personal stash intact.
A third scenario made the child a spectator while the researcher fed the monkey. The last scenario asked the toddler to keep the treat, serving as a check on whether happiness was mostly about doing what an adult said.
To keep the emotional “signal” consistent, the monkey reacted with the same level of excitement each time it received food. Toddlers’ faces were recorded, and later evaluated by independent reviewers who did not know the study’s purpose.
Reviewers rated happiness on a seven-point scale, from not happy to very happy, including clear signs like laughter. The team also rated the monkey’s enthusiasm, testing whether children were merely catching the puppet’s mood.
Giving beats getting—and it is not just obedience
Across the board, toddlers looked happier when they were the ones giving than when they were receiving. That result held whether giving cost them a treat or cost them nothing, suggesting the positive feeling was not limited to a “look how generous I am” moment that requires loss.
The comparison with the “keep it” scenario was especially revealing. If toddlers were pleased mainly because they had successfully followed an instruction, then keeping a treat on command should have been just as satisfying as giving on command. Instead, children showed less happiness when told to keep the treat than when told to give it away. Their emotional response tracked generosity more than compliance.
The study also separated action from observation. Watching someone else feed the monkey did not produce the same upbeat reactions as doing the feeding themselves. In other words, toddlers were not just entertained by a puppet getting snacks; they seemed to enjoy being the helpful agent.
What about simple mimicry? Because the monkey’s excitement was controlled and the researchers found no strong link between puppet enthusiasm and toddler happiness, the findings are difficult to explain as mood copying alone. The joy appeared to come from the child’s own choice to help.
Tan’s interpretation is that giving offers an internal reward even in the second year of life. That early reward could create a loop: giving feels good, so giving happens again, making prosocial behavior easier to build as children grow.
Importantly, the study does not claim that toddlers will automatically share in daily life. Context, temperament, and scarcity still matter. It does show, in a controlled setting, that the emotional payoff of giving can beat the payoff of getting. With a large sample and blinded ratings, the work strengthens the case that early generosity is more than a learned script.
The authors—Enda Tan, Julia Van de Vondervoort, Jeneesha Dhaliwal, Lara B. Aknin, and Jane Kiley Hamlin—also stress boundaries. The sample came from families in a single North American city, so the pattern should be tested in more varied cultural settings.
Future studies could pair facial ratings with body-based signals of emotion, such as pupil changes or skin conductance, to sharpen the picture. Still, the central message stands: even very young children may find sharing more rewarding than simply getting more.
