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Essay on Moral Development in Children
Over the months following birth, the initial direction of the moral- development pathway is determined by the infant's immediate caretakers. These are usually members of the family who serve as fabricators of development by controlling the moral events the young will experience and by exhibiting particular reactions to those events (Block J, Block JH, Keyes S. 1988). Caretakers' reactions show whether they approve or disapprove of the way participants in the episodes have behaved. Such reactions form the foundations of young children's notions of good and bad, of right and wrong, of proper and improper.
During the first year, infants' behavior cannot properly be deemed either moral or immoral by any common standard of morality, since at that age the young can hardly be credited with a sense of social right and wrong. When breast-feeding her 10-month-old son, a startled mother can exclaim, "The little devil bit me," without meaning that her baby was intentionally violating the moral principle of "don't harm innocent others." However, the mother's sudden reaction of jerking the nipple away and crying out may be remembered by the child in at least a vague sort of way. This occasion can thus be stored in long-term memory as an episodic fact, one that serves as an early building block of the child's embryonic sense of right and wrong (Baumeister RF, Stillwell AM, Heatherton TF. 1994). Having the nipple rudely removed, being jolted away from the breast, and hearing mother's angry tone are sensed as unpleasant.
Unpleasant experiences are perceived as something wrong that should be avoided. Pleasant experiences signify something right that can desirably be repeated. Thus, infants begin their moral life as thoroughgoing hedonists, judging the goodness and badness of episodes solely by whether such incidents cause oneself pleasure or pain. How events affect other people is of no concern to the very young......
