Moral Development in Childhood

11 Key excerpts on "Moral Development in Childhood"

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  Developmental and Educational Psychology for Teachers

  An applied approach

  • Dennis McInerney, David Putwain(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  From a cognitive psychological perspective, the process of development of moral concepts arises from children’s personal cognitive growth and experiences in the social world. The appreciation of the moral component of social experiences depends upon the cognitive level at which the child is functioning. It is in making sense of these social experiences that children perceive their salient moral aspects, for example pain or injustice, and generate ideas on how people should act towards each other. These moral rules are not based on given rules or adult influence but, rather, children construct their own judgments through abstractions from their experiences. As children grow older they re-evaluate existing concepts and construct new ones that are qualitatively different. Moral development, therefore, presents an interplay between individual cognitive development and cognitive development within the social context.

  As caregivers, parents, and educators, we are intimately involved in the process of communicating values to children and adolescents. It is helpful to understand, therefore, the ways in which the development of the moral self is believed to occur. Widely differing conceptions exist of how we develop a sense of morality and whether morals are universal or culturally based and acquired through socialisation. In the following sections we look at the theories put forward by Piaget, Kohlberg, neo-Kohlbergians, Gilligan, and Turiel.

  QUESTION POINT

  Before we begin examining theories of moral development consider how you yourself developed a ‘moral self’. What are the components of your moral self? What were the primary influential factors in the development of your moral values? Are your moral values different from the moral values of other people. If so, what are the differences, and how did these develop? Is there a relationship between religious values and moral values? If so, how and why? If not, why?

  Jean Piaget’s stage theory of moral development

  The developmental theory of Piaget presents the view that increasingly sophisticated moral reasoning develops through an invariant sequence of stages. Piaget contends that all morality consists of a system of rules that is handed from adults to children. Through training, practice, and developing intellect, children learn to nurture respect for these standards of conduct (Carpendale, 2009; Piaget, 1965).

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  Child Psychology

  A Canadian Perspective

  • Alastair Younger, Scott A. Adler, Ross Vasta(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Research on affect focuses on the emotions associated with moral behaviour, such as empathy and guilt. Research into the cognitive underpinnings of moral development investigates how children think about what they and others do. Studies of this type focus on children’s ability to examine a situation and decide whether a person’s behaviour was appropriate, and whether the person should be punished. Ultimately, of course, researchers aim to explain children’s behaviour—for example, why children steal, which children are more likely to start fights, and what factors promote sharing and cooperation among youngsters. Increasingly, models of moral development incorporate all three facets. Historically, however, each of these facets has been studied in isolation. This is due, in part, to the ways in which the four major approaches to development have conceptualized moral development. THEORIES OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT Two theoretical issues have dominated the study of moral development. One is whether children’s moral beliefs and behaviours reside in the child and simply emerge over time, or whether they reside in the culture and are transmitted to the child. The second issue involves the generality of moral rules. If they emerge from the child, they must have a large biological component, making them universal for all members of our species. On the other hand, if they develop within the social group, they are more arbitrary and thus can vary from one culture to the next. These two questions lie at the heart of much of the research on this topic. COGNITIVE-DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACHES The cognitive tradition has been most concerned with the development of children’s moral reason- ing as they struggle with issues involving moral rules and social conventions. Some of these issues, such as physician-assisted suicide or the death penalty, are complex, with compelling arguments on both sides.

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  Moral Development

  Theory and Applications

  • Elizabeth C. Vozzola, Amie K. Senland(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Moral Development in the 21st Century: Theoretical Roots and New Directions Passage contains an image

  1 Introduction

  DOI: 10.4324/9780429295461-2

  Humans have been pondering questions of morality for as long as we have records of their queries. Meno asks Socrates, “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice;… [or] whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?” (Plato, 380 BCE). In the relatively recent field of psychology, cognitive developmentalists have developed one set of answers, and thinkers from behavioral, psychoanalytic, social learning, and evolutionary perspectives yet others.

  A second edition of this text was important because of the current paradigm shift of theory and research within the field. The earlier dominant constructionist paradigm has been challenged, and some believe, replaced, by theories from evolutionary, biological, personality, and cultural psychology. Many researchers no longer hold to classic universal theories and stress the need to look at morality through specific cultural lenses.

  For the purposes of this book, we use the term morality in the general language usage of principles of right and wrong actions and judgments. This book looks at a special area of morality, the field of moral development, in two ways: (1) changes across time and experience in how people understand right and wrong; as well as (2) individual differences in moral judgments, emotions, and actions. Some perspectives stress that principles of moral conduct are set by society, others that they are actively constructed by the developing child, and still others that there is a significant biological underpinning to our moral judgments, emotions, and behavior.

  Part I of this book explores not only the classic theories upon which the modern field of moral development rests, but also newer theories and directions that are rarely covered in traditional developmental textbooks. In Chapter 2

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  Responsive Becoming: Moral Formation in Theological, Evolutionary, and Developmental Perspective

  • Angela Carpenter(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  Here I will argue while that the current aversion to moral philosophy makes it difficult for moral psychology to propose an independent theory of moral development, the processes they describe are in fact amenable to a conversation with theology. There are, however, some stubborn points of tension. Within a framework that is restricted to natural explanations, the developmental literature describes a situation in which the conditions that children require for optimal moral development seem to exceed the capacities of ordinary caregivers. When reading studies of development one is struck by the extent to which ideals of conscientious parenting far exceed the standards of the “good-enough mother” famously set by Donald Winnicott. 3 A crucial question will thus be whether the natural processes uncovered in hundreds of developmental studies could ever conceivably be united in one human family or if, as with Horace Bushnell’s theory of nurture, developmental studies will ultimately only expose human limitation and incapacity. The human infant Although the ultimate target in exploring this material is to gain insight into early moral formation, this first section takes a step back to ask about the person who is being formed. The context in which a child grows matters immensely, but she is not a “blank slate.” Even in early infancy the child has, or is in the process of rapidly acquiring, a wide array of cognitive, social, and affective capacities, and much of the work now being done on children’s moral development takes these basic capacities, as well as their ontogenetic development, to be an important point of reference for understanding the moral behavior that becomes visible in childhood. For the present purposes I am going to consider infant capacities from three different perspectives, each of which will help to illuminate the foundation for later moral formation in childhood

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  The Routledge Handbook of Mass Media Ethics

  • Lee Wilkins, Clifford G. Christians, Lee Wilkins, Clifford G. Christians(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4

  Moral Development

  A Psychological Approach to Understanding Moral Decision Making

  Renita Coleman and Lee Wilkins

  Introduction

  Research on moral development attempts to respond to the following question: how is it that people grow morally, and what influences the development of a moral life? Moral development research makes some important assumptions that are seldom addressed in the literature but which are nonetheless central to it:

  • All human beings have the capacity for moral thinking.
  • Moral thinking is linked to experience. While philosophers have contributed enormously to a thoroughgoing analysis of the implications of choice within experience, no legitimate ethical theory divorces human action, and hence experience, from moral thinking, learning and growth.
  • Moral thinking can be both general and particular. There are general moral questions—is it right to lie or to kill—to which all human beings have a response. But, there are particular elaborations of moral questions—is it ever appropriate for a journalist to deceive a source who is attempting to deceive the journalist—to which professionals must respond within a particular context.

  This chapter will briefly review the general understandings of the field, place our research within that context, and then suggest potential paths for additional empirical and theoretical work.

  Theoretical Building Blocks

  The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget is considered the field’s founder in terms of both research results and approach. Piaget was particularly interested in how children put their cognitive worlds in order. He researched and wrote the book The Moral Judgment of the Child

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  Handbook of Moral Behavior and Development

  Volume 2: Research

  • William M. Kurtines, Jacob Gewirtz, Jacob L. Lamb(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  5 Social and Moral Development in Early Childhood Melanie Killen ABSTRACT

  The focus of this chapter is on social-cognitive development in early childhood and on some of the studies which have examined social judgment and moral behavior in the preschool period. It is asserted that in order to understand early social development it is necessary to be explicit about the criteria used for determining social and moral categories of behavior. In addition, a sensitivity to the context needs to be incorporated into both research methodologies and theoretical interpretations of early behavior and development. It is argued that research which has taken these issues into account has provided a more differentiated model of early social and moral development than has been previously postulated.

  INTRODUCTION

  The focus of this chapter is on social-cognitive development in early childhood and on the existing evidence for social judgment and moral behavior in the preschool period. This chapter makes two central points: (1) that in order to understand early social and moral development it is necessary to be explicit about the criteria for analyzing “social” and “moral” categories of behavior, and (2) that it is essential to conduct detailed analyses of the social context. It is argued that the movement towards the use of explicit criteria and a sensitivity to the context has led to a characterization of early development as differentiated, rather than global, and as reflecting a moral, rather than premoral orientation. This new characterization differs from the traditional one espoused by the predominant theoretical models in the field which initiated much of the work on social and moral development.

  In this chapter, the theoretical foundations of research on early social and moral development are described followed by an examination of selected research in social and moral development. In addition, current research on preschoolers’ social interactions and social judgments is discussed. The aim of this research has been to analyze how children resolve conflicts in the preschool setting. This has been done by investigating the role of context variables on social exchanges and by determining the social and moral components of conflict episodes.

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  Theory, Practice, and Trends in Human Services

  An Introduction

  • Edward Neukrug(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Kristina Williams-Neukrug Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 138 CHAPTER 6 Piaget’s research on child development has greatly helped us understand how children learn and recognize the limitations of their abilities based on their age and developmental stage. Such knowledge has greatly affected styles of teaching, ways to parent effectively, and methods of counseling children. Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development By having children respond to moral dilemmas (problems of a moral nature that have no clear-cut answer), Lawrence Kohlberg (1963, 1981, 1984) discovered that moral under-standing and reasoning develop in a predictable pattern. He identified three levels of devel-opment, each containing two stages. The first level, termed the preconventional level (roughly ages 2–9 years), is based on the notion that children make moral decisions out of fear of being punished or out of desire for a reward. In Stage 1 of this level, children make moral decisions to avoid punishments from individuals in authority who hold power over them (e.g., parents). In Stage 2, children make moral decisions with an egocentric/hedonistic desire to satisfy their needs and in hopes of gaining personal rewards. Imagine a 6-year-old wanting to play with her favorite toy dur-ing dinner time. A parent might say, “No, you can’t play with that toy now, but after dinner we’ll make special time to do whatever you want.” A child might initially say, “Sure, Mom,” not wanting to get punished for doing the wrong thing.

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  Values Education

  Theory, Practice, Problems, Prospects

  • John R. Meyer, Brian Burnham, John Cholvat, Brian Burnham, John Cholvat(Authors)
  • 1975(Publication Date)
  • Wilfrid Laurier University Press

    (Publisher)

  A DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH TO INTERPERSONAL AND MORAL AWARENESS IN YOUNG CHILDREN: SOME THEORETICAL AND EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF LEVELS OF SOCIAL PERSPECTIVE TAKING ROBERT L. SELMAN Harvard Graduate School of Education /. A Structural Approach to Understanding Social Thought in the Young Child Rather than focusing only on the intellectual aspects of the child's mental life to the exclusion of the social or emotional aspects, Piagetian or structural-developmental theory considers the dichotomization of these two aspects false to begin with. Recent research indicates that children's social understanding de-velops according to systematic sequences of stages in which there is parallel aware-ness of logical and physical concepts. For example, Lawrence Kohlberg's research in the area of moral development (1968) indicates that moral judgment develops through a sequence of universal stages. Although it has been commonly assumed that moral values and beliefs are acquired through some process of cultural transmission, or of identification with the beliefs and values of parents and members of adult society, the research of Kohlberg and his associates indicates that children pass through an invariant sequence of stages of reasoning about values and beliefs, and that the modes, or way of moral reasoning is as important in understanding moral behavior as the content of the beliefs themselves. My own research falls within this structural-developmental framework and is in part related to research in moral development. My colleagues and I have been studying stages in the development of a basic aspect of interpersonal cognition-social perspective-taking ability. Stages of social-perspective taking refer to the developing awareness of a uniquely human property and characteristic— subjectivity.

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  Child Psychology

  Development in a Changing Society

  • Robin Harwood, Scott A. Miller, Ross Vasta(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  The results of the study indicated that in severe or life-threatening situations, the majority of respondents at all ages in both the United States and India felt that a person has a moral obligation to help another if he or she was able to do so. However, at moderate levels of need, the perception of moral obligation dropped off dramatically in the United States, but not among respondents in India. In other words, children and young adults in India appeared to construe moral obligations more broadly than in the United States, perceiving duty to others more morally binding across a broader range of situations. Much cultural research on moral development focuses on children’s involvement in moral situations that naturally arise during everyday life. For example, how do caregivers foster chil- dren’s moral development in the context of sibling interactions (Dunn, 1987; Edwards, 1987; Whiting & Edwards, 1988)? How does participation in cultural institutions (such as schools, churches, and community service organizations) contribute to children’s moral development (Eccles & Barber, 1999; Lewis, 1995; Youniss, McLellan, & Mazer, 2001)? Learning Objective 14.1: Compare and contrast four theoretical approaches to the study of moral development. 1. What is Piaget’s model of moral development? 2. How do Kohlberg’s stages of moral development differ from Piaget’s model? 3. Is there evidence that males and females have different kinds or levels of moral reasoning? 4. To what extent do Turiel’s domains of morality have cross-cultural validity? 5. How does the cultural construction approach to moral development differ from other approaches? Influences on Moral Development In addition to social and cultural values and institutions, other influences on moral de- velopment include individual life experiences, peer interactions, parental discipline, per- sonality factors such as temperament, and emotions or moral affect.

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  An Introduction to Developmental Psychology

  • Alan Slater, J. Gavin Bremner, Alan Slater, J. Gavin Bremner(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • BPS Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  In contrast, children who had difficulty regulating their emotions presumably became too anxious or too angry in discussions about moral conflicts to benefit from others’ insights and suggestions. Summary There is both continuity and transformation in development across childhood. Young children who have difficulty regulating emotions are likely to retain this trait through adolescence. The consequences of poor emotion regulation are likely to be increased aggression, a tendency to attribute hostile intentions to others, and slow moral judgment development. There are dramatic changes in children’s understanding of moral obligations. With age, children evidence increasingly sophisticated understanding of rights and responsibilities to others. Sophisticated moral reasoning is predictive of higher levels of prosocial action and a lower likelihood of behaving in an antisocial fashion. SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON PROSOCIAL AND ANTISOCIAL DEVELOPMENT Our review so far has focused on the psychological features within children that are the foundation for prosocial tendencies, antisocial behaviour and moral development. These features – personality traits, emotion regulation, moral reasoning, and so on PROSOCIAL TENDENCIES, ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOUR AND Moral Development in Childhood 529 – are profoundly shaped by social influences. In the sections that follow, we review the effects of social relationships and culture on the constituents of prosocial and antisocial development. DEVELOPMENT WITHIN RELATIONSHIPS Parents Psychologists have often noted that children bear remarkable psychological similarities to their siblings and parents. For example, impulsive children tend to have brothers and sisters who behave likewise and students who excel have parents who earned high grades. There are many exceptions to this general finding, of course, and no child is a duplicate of any other.

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  Moral Development and Reality

  Beyond the Theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman

  • John C. Gibbs(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Because preschoolers generally find it difficult to keep in mind and work with multi-ple sources of information, their moral understanding or moral judgment tends to be superficial. Broadly speaking, their attention is readily captured by or centered on that which is immediate and salient in their social and nonsocial worlds. And what could be more salient than the chatter of one's 8 Moral Development and Reality own mind (self-talk), one's own desires or impulses, and the immediate needs of one's own body, that is to say, one's egoistic perspective? Although Piaget's original concept of egocentrism as an incapacity did not prove to be valid, egocentric bias, a tendency to center on one's own immediate perspective at the expense of others, lives on in the literature today. Just as centration and superficiality characterize early childhood moral judgment, decentration and depth can be said to characterize moral under-standing and perception in the school years and beyond. Taking into account others' perspectives (i.e., decentering from one's egoistic perspective) and growing beyond the superficial in a cognitive sense have to do with the con-struction of moral understanding and judgment, in particular, of ideal moral reciprocity. Again, mature persons would understand that the prank played upon Ed was unfair, that they—especially if they were Ed with his mental disability—would not wish to be treated that way. And out of that under-standing, they might act, to refrain or intervene. In other words, the cognitive-developmental claim is that there is a cognitive motive in morality. The motive is not insurmountable, to be sure; but it is there nonetheless.

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