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Children from kindergarten and Grades 3 and 6 were interviewed to assess their awareness of variables (helpers' attributes, helpees' attributes, task demands, intervention techniques) that affect the quality of helping behaviors. The results suggest that kindergarten children appear to recognize the relevance of some specific characteristics of people (e.g., willingness, competence) for effective helping, the necessity of different helping actions for different helping problems, and the effects of helpees' characteristics (e.g., cooperativeness) on helping processes. However, younger children are less likely than third-and sixth-grade children to indicate that effective helping is a consequence of a joint function of several attributes of helpers, and that initial knowledge about the requirements of helping problems can be used to determine task difficulty and appropriate helping strategies. They also seem less sensitive than older children to constraints involved in helping situations when they evaluate the suitability of various kinds of intervention techniques (e.g., indirect forms of help). Sixth-grade children's spontaneous description of good helpers is more differentiated than that of kindergarten and third-grade children, with the inclusion of such internal attributes as "sensitivity to helpees' needs."Numerous studies appearing in the recent literature on children's helping (e.g., Mussen & Eisenberg-Berg, 1977;Staub, 1978) have contributed much to our knowledge of ageassociated changes in children's disposition to help, and the social (e.g., modeling) and cognitive (e.g., role-taking) factors facilitating such disposition. In contrast, relatively little is known about children's understanding of effective helping, although several investigators have suggested the importance of an awareness of constructive help-giving to a person's prosocial development (Hoff-