Numerous contextual factors have been identified that impact the development of children’s prosocial behavior, yet the influence of child-initiated factors on prosocial behavior and its underlying mechanism remains unclear. This study employed three longitudinal models to examine in depth how children’s school engagement may promote the development of their own prosocial behavior. Three-wave longitudinal data from 4691 children (M _age = 9.480, SD = 0.507; 48.2% female) with 2-year intervals were used. Sequentially, a cross-lagged panel model, a random intercept cross-lagged panel model, and a parallel process latent growth model were constructed. The findings indicated that children’s school engagement consistently predicted the future level, dynamic changes at within-person level, and long-term trends in their prosocial behavior, and these longitudinal relationships were partially mediated by parental monitoring. These results reveal a child-parent synergistic mechanism for the development of prosocial behavior, wherein children’s school engagement both directly promotes their own prosocial behavior and simultaneously enhances prosocial behavior through eliciting increased parental monitoring.

人们已经确定了许多影响儿童亲社会行为发展的情境因素，但儿童发起的因素对亲社会行为的影响及其潜在机制仍不清楚。这项研究采用了三个纵向模型来深入研究儿童的学校参与如何促进他们自己的亲社会行为的发展。使用来自 4691 名儿童的三波纵向数据（M _age = 9.480，SD = 0.507；48.2% 女性），间隔为 2 年。随后，构建了交叉滞后面板模型、随机截距交叉滞后面板模型和并行过程潜在增长模型。研究结果表明，儿童的学校参与度始终能够预测未来的水平、个人内部的动态变化以及亲社会行为的长期趋势，而这些纵向关系部分是由父母的监督调节的。这些结果揭示了亲社会行为发展的儿童-父母协同机制，其中儿童的学校参与既直接促进他们自己的亲社会行为，同时通过引起父母加强监督来增强亲社会行为。