Moral Development

Another important aspect of a child's development is learning to distinguish between the rightness or wrongness of human actions. The way children come to distinguish right from wrong, to feel guilt, to take other people's perspective, and to help others who are in trouble, are all components of moral development. Just as children pass through various stages of cognitive development, Lawrence Kohlberg proposed that they also pass through various age-related stages of moral development. Kohlberg studied this by interviewing children using stories in which characters face a moral dilemma, and asking children what the characters in the dilemma should do, and why — finding that children approach questions of right and wrong quite differently at different ages.

A young child, before around 9 years of age, thinks largely in terms of external authority — an action is considered wrong because the child is punished for it, and right because the child is rewarded for it. As the child grows, by early adolescence, moral reasoning develops through the rules set by others, such as parents or the laws of society; these rules come to be accepted by the child as their own — 'internalised' — in order to be virtuous and to win the approval of others, rather than simply to avoid punishment. At this stage, children tend to view rules as absolute guidelines that should always be followed, and moral thinking remains relatively inflexible. As children grow further, they gradually develop a more personal moral code of their own. …