Intensive observation of the helping interactions of 40 children in the third through fifth grades of five Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area schools was conducted for the purpose of assessing the impact of familiarity on the success of children's help-seeking from peers. The amount of visual regard that children received from peers was also assessed. Three types of students were selected for participation: 15 students from resource rooms, 15 students mainstreamed from self-contained classrooms, and 10 students who spent all of their instructional time in the mainstream. Students from resource rooms differed from those from self-contained classrooms in the extent to which they were exposed to regular students in instructional settings. Findings suggested that the relative lack of help-seeking success experienced by the self-contained classroom students was due to a tendency on the part of those students to make fewer requests than their classmates, and to have even fewer of their requests accepted by other students in the mainstream classroom. The familiarity of students from self-contained classrooms and resource rooms to their classmates covaried positively with others' acceptance of their help-seeking requests. Students in the regular classroom directed more of their visual regard to students from resource rooms than to students from self-contained classrooms. The more visual regard children received from classmates, the more likely they were to have their helping requests accepted. (Author/RH)