Fostering Goodness & Caring: Promoting Moral Development of Young Children
By Ruth A. Wilson Ph. D.
Early childhood education should address the moral development of the child, especially the caring and compassionate aspects of morality. What could be more important than teaching our children a sense of caring and social responsibility? We might teach them reading, writing, math, and computer skills. We might teach them about business, history, and geography. But if we neglect to teach them to be caring and compassionate, have we really given them all they need for fulfilling their potential and achieving a sense of joy and satisfaction in their lives?
Moral Development
Some people argue that moral development and a sense of caring are values to be fostered at home rather than at school. However, the teaching of these values doesn’t seem to be happening, as evidenced by the behaviors and attitudes of many adults in our society. A recent book by David Callahan (The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, 2004) presents a volume of research data on the selfish nature of our
culture today and people’s willingness to “do wrong” to get ahead. As Callahan’s work indicates, our current culture reflects a serious lack of social responsibility and an unhealthy compulsion to succeed at any cost. Addressing this moral crisis will take more than the assumption – or wish – that children will just naturally evolve into caring adults who choose to make socially responsible decisions.
As positive moral characteristics do not appear spontaneously (Berkowitch & Grych, 1998), addressing our cultural moral crisis will take the commitment and involvement of many elements of society, including early childhood education. Community involvement is especially important in light of the fact that “many children are not taught much about ethics and honesty at home…Worse, many parents may be caught up in the cheating culture themselves and set a negative example for their children” (Callahan, 2004, p. 286). Many educators are aware of the cultural moral crisis and feel a need to promote ethical development in the classroom (Callahan, 2004; Halverson, 2004). Determining the best way to do this, however, isn’t always understood.
Morality and moral development are sometimes defined in terms of objective norms and established standards of behaviors. This view of morality often provides the basic structure for character education programs, where a set of virtues (such as honesty, kindness, courage, determination, etc.) are identified and promoted. Lawrence Kohlberg (1984), an internationally recognized researcher and expert in the field of moral development, used the term “a bag of virtues” in discussing the limitations of this traditional framework.
Kohlberg and others who view moral development in a more developmental and constructivist perspective believe that “goodness” is developed from the inside of an individual rather than being imposed from the outside (as the traditional character education model suggests). They recognize, as Halverson (2004) says, that, “the simplistic strategy of directly teaching ethics does not work” (p. 157). Robert Coles, in The Moral Life of Children (1986), speaks to this same misunderstanding: “It is a mistake to think of morality as a set of external standards that adults somehow foist upon an unknowing or unwilling child…most of our current moral education efforts fail precisely because of this mistaken yet pervasive assumption” (p. 2). Alfie Kohn (1997) offers a similar critical assessment of character education in schools. He feels that character education in most schools is a form of indoctrination in which absolutes of a moral action are instilled or transmitted. An alternative proposed by Kohn (1997) is to involve children in actively assessing certain behaviors against real situations and allowing them to make moral judgments accordingly.
Developmentalists, such as Kohlberg, propose that the process of attaining moral maturity occurs over time if conditions are favorable for such growth. They also believe that a child’s moral maturity is directly related to the way she thinks about concepts such as justice, rights, equality, and human welfare. Over time and through a variety of social interactions, children come to develop their own understandings of these concepts. Thus, their sense of “goodness” is constructed through their own thinking about their experiences and through dialogue with others about what these experiences mean (Nucci, 2001). Children’s sense of goodness is also fostered through encouragement offered by significant adults in their lives. One principal of an elementary school in Florida offers such encouragement at the end of his daily announcements by saying something like, “Remember, children, be kind to one another” (Comora, 2004).
Kohlberg’s theory of moral development builds on Jean Piaget’s work, which focused primarily on cognitive development. According to Piaget (1965), children construct and reconstruct their knowledge of the world through interactions with the environment. Such knowledge includes children’s understandings about what is right and what is wrong (Piaget, 1965). Moral development and cognitive development are thus closely intertwined. Moral reasoning is, in fact, considered to be one of the central aspects (or “building blocks”) of moral functioning (Berkowitz & Grych, 1998). Being a “good” person, however, involves more than having the cognitive understanding of what is right and what is wrong. Other central aspects of moral functioning include empathy, conscience, and altruism (Berkowitz & Grych, 1998).
According to the constructivist theory of development, these central aspects of moral functioning cannot be given to children – but they can be fostered. We know that we can’t give young children an understanding of such concepts as cause and effect or object permanence, yet we purposefully provide experiences that promote such understandings. In a similar way, if we want to foster goodness in children, we would do well to provide the kinds of experiences that promote moral functioning – and we would do so starting at a young age (Callahan, 2004; Noddings, 2002a).
Promoting Moral Development
The constructivist model of moral development suggests that we should avoid giving children a list of do’s and don’ts (or virtues and vices) to guide their behavior. Yet we all know that children must learn to act in certain socially acceptable ways to get along well in society and to maintain a healthy sense of self. They must learn, for example, to follow certain rules of etiquette while eating, to use the bathroom appropriately, and to express their feelings of anger and frustration without hurting others. While it is important for children to learn and abide by these “rules,” teaching such rules isn’t what moral education is all about. Just as morality involves more than thinking, so does it involve more than a set of behaviors. We may be able to get children to do certain things or “to behave themselves” as we want them to, but that doesn’t mean they’ve developed a sense of goodness or morality (Coles, 1997). Morality runs much deeper than behaving according to the rules set down by others. Morality includes a sense of justice, compassion, and caring about the welfare of others. It also includes perspective-taking ability – that is, the ability to discern how someone might be thinking or feeling.
While some people may think that preschool children aren’t cognitively or emotionally ready to be concerned about anyone but themselves, research indicates otherwise (Callahan, 2004; Wyckoff, 2000). Caring behavior becomes evident during the first year of life. Many infants show signs of distress when another baby cries, and toddlers become uneasy when another child gets hurt or is punished. Some two-year-olds even display the same emotion as the child being punished (Wyckoff, 2000). Such behaviors indicate a sense of caring and the ability to take the perspective of someone other than self. Helping children grow in this perspective-taking ability should be a major goal of moral education at the early childhood level. Following are six guidelines and suggestions on how to promote moral functioning with young children, especially in relation to caring for others.
1. Help children understand the reason behind rules, especially rules relating to such moral concerns as justice, fairness, and other aspects of human welfare. Discuss the reasons why one behavior is preferable to another (e.g, sharing a box of crayons is preferable to pushing another child away from the art area). In discussing these contrasting behaviors with a young child, the focus should be on how what the child does affects someone else (e.g., sharing crayons makes a play partner happy while pushing the child away makes the other child sad). Such discussions foster empathy, higher levels of moral reasoning, and altruism (Berkowitz & Grych, 1998; Wyckoff, 2000). These types of discussions also help children develop perspective-taking abilities in that it focuses on how someone else might think or feel in a given situation (Berkowitz & Grych, 1998; Wyckoff, 2000).
Discussions with children should take the form of “true dialogue” as described by Noddings (2002a). True dialogue occurs, Noddings says, when participants engage “in mutual exploration, a search for meaning, or the solution of some problem” (p. 287). In true dialogue, teachers refrain from giving all the right answers. They solicit, listen to, and seriously consider the child’s point of view. Such interactions never become just a “telling session” on the part of the adult. In fact, some of the most effective discussions for promoting moral development occur between child and child versus child and adult (Nucci, 2001). The adult, however, will often se