I’ve hit on a particularly interesting section in ‘You Want To Do What?: Instant answers to your parenting dilemmas‘ which covers morals.

The question was posed “When do children begin to know what is right and wrong?”. The section goes on to explain that there are three levels of development, preconventional, conventional and postconvential. Children in the preconventional stage, up to aged ten, are concerned with meeting their own needs whilst avoiding punishment. It is clear why this age encompasses the sneaky behaviour of toddlers, hiding behind sofas to draw on the wall so they won’t be caught and thus receive punishment, and why older children will lie to ‘get away’ with things.

The next phase is the conventional stage whereby children are more concerned with living up to expectations and fitting in with familial and societal ideals. This stage runs through to adulthood where behaviour is adjusted to suit environment and the relative behaviour of others. One no longer needs to live up to expectations but behaves in an appropriate manner for the occasion, this works on the basis of a social contact, i.e treat others the way you expect to be treated etc..

Going back to our children, many of which will be in the preconventional stage, it’s our job as parent to guide them into the conventional stage, the main difference between the two stages being the emotional element. In the second stage the child is capable of understanding how their actions affect others, they are also able to demonstrate a certain level of emotional empathy.

Understanding this main difference between the stages is key. It’s easy to identify that the best way to teach toddlers and primary aged children (5-11) good morals is to take the approach of encouraging emotional empathy. Of course there should be punishment, but first there needs to be an explanation of how the action has affected the emotions and wellbeing of the other person/s. In a way the action itself is less important than the way it had an impact on the other parties.

Moving on to the punishment, is a smack really the most appropriate punishment? If the exercise is to teach emotional empathy then surely helping to solve the problem or reversing the action (ie cleaning the mess) and ‘making it up’ to the affected parties is what is really important when it comes to encouraging children to have good morals.