Via the Western Confucian: Morality Play.

Thinking about kids’ right and wrong

Jean Piaget looms over current theories of moral development. In 1932, the late Swiss psychologist proposed that children progress through three stages to construct mature concepts of right and wrong. He believed that kids achieve a sense of autonomy and a critical stance toward parenting practices by late childhood or early adolescence.

Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg elaborated on Piaget’s theory in 1969, arguing that children don’t formulate moral concepts such as justice, rights and autonomy until late adolescence.

One alternative to Kohlberg’s approach proposes that a morality of care and empathy develops alongside a morality of justice. Other researchers argued that children in non-Western cultures come to think about morality differently than the Western youngsters studied by Piaget and Kohlberg.

Today, a school of thought developed by University of California, Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel asserts that moral decisions based on fairness and welfare develop alongside those based on other concerns, such as social rules. He and other researchers posit that children in all cultures think critically about the morality of parents’ and others’ actions at earlier ages than assumed by Piaget and Kohlberg.

Piaget’s suggestion that children form and revise moral concepts based on their social experiences remains influential. Most researchers, though, now reject his idea that moral development proceeds through one-size-fits-all stages.