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What factors contribute to moral development in children? How do kids learn what’s right and what’s wrong?
Two schools of thought exist. One view asserts that moral development in children is self-driven—that kids figure it out on their own, through reason. Another perspective is that children learn morality through their society, which accounts for different moral codes in different parts of the world.
Read on to learn more about these two theories regarding moral development in children.
The Rationalist Theory of Moral Development in Children
According to the theories of rationalism, kids figure out and understand morality on their own, through reason. Consider the following experiment from psychologist Jean Piaget.
When kids are younger than age six or seven, if they see two glasses of water, they’ll always say the glass of water that’s taller has more water in it, no matter the girth of the glasses. They can’t understand the concept of volume, even if it’s explained to them. But when they get to be about seven, they learn about the concept of volume by themselves by playing with the water in the glasses.
After more experiments, Piaget concluded that moral development in children is similar to how they learn about volume—understanding is not innate, nor is it taught. It’s self-constructed, and it happens as kids socialize with other kids, learning how to play and creating and abiding by the rules of games.
If a child is exposed to enough experiences, she will eventually become a moral human being. Rationalists believe that it is the growth of reasoning that helps us gain moral knowledge.
Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg updated and deepened Piaget’s theories. He argued that moral development in children happens in six stages:
- The first two stages are “pre-conventional”: Kids judge whether an action is wrong by whether someone is punished for it.
- The second two stages are “conventional”: This involves respect for authority but in name only: For example, you take your brother’s hand and hit him with it. You’re following the rule not to hit your brother (you’re not hitting him, he’s hitting himself), but you’re not respecting the spirit of the rule, the reason it was put in place. This happens around the beginning of grade school.
- The final two stages are “post-conventional”: Around puberty, many children begin questioning why laws exist and why authority figures have power. They also justify dishonesty if it’s done for a greater good. This is when kids get good at working out ethics for themselves.
A Cultural Anthropologist’s Theory
Piaget and Kohlberg’s theories about moral development in children were unconvincing to cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder, who argued that the diversity of moral attitudes across cultures shows that children don’t construct their own understanding of morality.
Shweder argued that moral psychologists created rationalist arguments based on their studies of individualistic societies, which are unique to the West. These arguments might not apply in the sociocentric societies that are common in the rest of the world. In these societies, there is less of a line between moral rules and social conventions. Shweder conducted an experiment to test this theory, with kids and adults from Chicago (an individualistic society) and Orissa, a state on the East Coast of India (a sociocentric society).
Shweder and his collaborators came up with nine short stories where someone violates a rule in either the U.S. or Orissa. Everyone condemned the actions in some of the stories as obviously wrong. But in others, the Indian subjects condemned actions that the Americans didn’t see as wrong, such as a 25-year-old son calling his father by his first name. Indian subjects as young as five believed that older sons shouldn’t call their father by his first name.In sociocentric societies like Orissa’s, the social order and the moral order are the same. Therefore, it’s clear that kids are not teaching themselves morality without the assistance of their societies.
Moral development in children is really a question of how humans figure out right and wrong. These two theories provide plenty of food for thought.
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- Why we all can't get along
- How our divergent moralities evolved
- How we can counter our natural self-righteousness to decrease political divides
