Caregivers' everyday moral reasoning predicts young children's aggressive, prosocial, and moral development: Evidence from ambulatory assessment

Abstract

Developmental theories have proposed caregiver reactions, in particular caregivers' moral reasoning with their children, as crucial factors in children's developing morality. Yet, empirical evidence is scarce and mainly restricted to laboratory contexts. Here, we used the ambulatory assessment method to investigate how caregiver responses to moral transgressions longitudinally relate to children's emerging moral agency. On the first measurement point, mothers (N = 220) reported on nine consecutive evenings on a moral transgression of their 5‐ to 46‐month‐olds', their emotional and verbal reactions, and how in turn their child reacted. Five months later, mothers reported on their child's aggressive and prosocial (helping, sharing, comforting) behavior. Our results demonstrated that (1) caregiver reasoning supported children's sharing and comforting behavior and was related to lower levels of children's aggressive behavior half a year later, that (2) caregiver reasoning reactions supported children's negative evaluations of their own transgressions while compliance‐based caregiver reactions (e.g., physical interventions, reprimands) were predictive of children's subsequent emotional distress and anger, and that (3) caregiver social conformity and reflective functioning abilities emerged as determinants of caregiver negative moral emotions. Thus, this study uses an innovative methodological approach to uncover key characteristics of caregiver moral reactions supporting the development of morality.

Education to justice and infants' sense of fairness

“…We identify a set of different kinds of interventions that could be aimed to develop morality and fairness normative concerns in both family and day nursery contexts: a) Increasing the frequency of social interactions with caregivers and peers (i.e., siblings) for the (co-)construction of social norms (Dunn et al, 2014;Tomasello, 2018;Essler and Paulus, 2022); b) spurring a supportive climate of relationships (Bulotsky-Shearer et al, 2020) and helping children develop empathic responses toward the victims of unfair treatment;…”

“…Notably, several studies emphasize the role of specific training for educators about how to promote moral development in their classrooms (e.g., Bustamante et al, 2021), as well as for parents about how to improve their intuitive parenting style (Essler and Paulus, 2022). Beyond the role of specific training aimed to improve parenting, it is well-known that parents promote children's moral understanding naturally, since both affective and cognitive components of parents' interactions with their children may facilitate children's moral development (Smetana, 1999;Walker, 1999;Tan and Yasin, 2020).…”