Moral Development

Today, I'm taking on a topic that I find fascinating, and that is moral development. Moral development really describes the process, how as humans we learn and internalize our value systems, how we understand right from wrong, how we make decisions. This development starts in the earliest of days and continues throughout adulthood. Hi, this is Dene. I'm the founder of Simple Families. Simple Families is an online community for parents who are seeking a simpler, more intentional life. In this show, we focus on minimalism with kids, positive parenting, family wellness, and decreasing the mental load. My perspectives are based in my first-hand experience raising kids, but also rooted in my PhD in child development. So you're going to hear conversations that are based in research, but more importantly, real life. Thanks for joining us. Hi there. Thanks so much for tuning in. Before we jump into today's episode, here is a one-minute word from our sponsor, PrepDish. PrepDish is a meal planning service. You don't get any food shipped in the mail. Instead, it's a PDF delivered to your inbox. I find this incredibly handy. I use that PDF to add what I need to my shopping cart online, and it's all laid out so simply in front of me. So I pick up my groceries and I set aside a day to do the prep day work. Usually this takes about an hour because I like to do the super fast menus and I do it together with my husband. And after that hour of work is done, we're ready for the week. On dish day, the day that we actually serve the food on the table, the cutting is done, the rice is made, the sauces are complete. It really just involves putting the last few pieces together to get a great homemade meal in front of my family. I love PrepDish because it's been a wonderful way for our family to divide and conquer the responsibilities of feeding a family, which feels so heavy for so many of us. If you want to try it out, go to prepdish.com/families and you'll get two weeks free. Again, that's prepdish.com/families. Let's go ahead and jump into today's episode. I am talking about moral development. Admittedly, I am not an expert on this topic, but it is a topic that has fascinated me since I first learned about it in grad school. As a psychotherapist working with kids and with parents, this is a topic that comes up a lot. I have been asked by a handful of parents, "Is my kid a psychopath?" And that might sound like a crazy question, but when we observe a kid who doesn't seem to know right from wrong, doesn't seem to be adapting the value set that we have. Or keeps making poor decisions. We start to wonder, "Nature, nurture," is something going astray. So today, I am going to talk about typical moral development. What the process looks like, as some developmental psychologists say from womb to tomb. Of course, there are variations in their deviations. But some of our concerns around our kids' moral development can be better understood and better explained by understanding how this path typically unfolds. Now, moral development is a very tricky field because morals are not universal. Morals are determined by social influences, cultural influences, religious beliefs, life experiences. They can vary immensely. One of my peves about the field of child development is so much is based on typical and atypical. When you know, like most things, there really is no normal. But that aside, I'm going to talk a little bit about the theories around how morality is developed. So it's this lifelong process, right? Our moral development is shaped by our life experiences, by our cognitive abilities, by the people that were around, and when I talk about moral development, I'm talking about how we internalize values, how we understand and act on right and wrong, and what our personal process is on making moral decisions. Thinking about a two-year-old who knows they're not supposed to go into the cookie jar, but they really want that cookie, and they do it anyways. In moving along the line, thinking about a more complex adult example, like Luigi Mangione, who really acted on his own ethical principles, even though they went against the law and involved taking human life. Before we get into the stages, we have a one-minute word from our sponsor, Team SuperCrew. This is a new sponsor to the podcast, and a perfect one for this topic today. You may have seen Team SuperCrew books on social media where they've gone viral. It's a box set of four books that helps kids with emotional regulation skills. They have fun, relatable characters and storylines that kids can really connect with. They're rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a way to help kids recognize and understand their emotions. And much like the stages we're talking about today, these books meet your kids at different stages. They're great for ages 2 to 8. In the younger years, they learn to recognize their emotions, and then they learn to name and understand them. So they get a little bit older. They learn how to use CBT skills to reframe and regulate their emotions. These books are different from other emotional learning books. They're backed by science, which I love. Go to teamsupercrew.com and use the code SimpleFamilies to get 10% off. You'll also get a free gift, a step-by-step imaginary play guide that helps you and your child learn important emotional regulation skills. Again, that's teamsupercrew.com and use the code SimpleFamilies to get 10% off. Thanks for supporting our sponsors. Before I get into the stages, the typical stages of development, typical whatever that means. I'll tell you how this topic comes up the most often in my work. In my work, I see a lot of kids with what's called asynchronous development. That means they develop different domains at different rates. Most frequently, that's kids who are cognitively and intellectually very bright, but social and emotionally delayed. Now, that's the most common combination. There also can be kids who linguistically are very advanced. The way that they speak and present themselves seems much older than they are, but physically they're very clumsy. Their handwriting is delayed. Often it happens that kids are ahead in one area and behind it another. When this does happen, it can be very confusing to parents. How is it that my kid can recount the vast details of the water cycle, but smacks their brother in the head instead of using their words? We've probably all seen some sort of mismatch like this from our kids. And perhaps that's one of the most common reasons that kids end up in therapy, is they're really struggling in one realm of life, maybe more than one realm of life. And I get a lot of parents who say, "I don't think my kid has any empathy." Now empathy isn't something that we can really quantify. Perhaps there are rating skills that do that, but as an outside observer, it can be really difficult to assess a child's level of empathy. And although it may be counterintuitive, some of the kids who appear to have the least amount of empathy are actually the kids who have the most. Now let me clarify that. I have a kid who recently learned about the term empath, which is someone who identifies as an extremely empathetic person that feels the feelings of other people. And this child, when they were young, seemed like they had very little empathy. Maybe sometimes none. This is the child who would smack another child on the playground. And then look at them, stone face, never apologizing. You know, in watching this kid grow, and this shift, as they've gotten older and been able to verbalize these patterns better, I see that sometimes when you are a kid who feels really deeply and is very much impacted by other people's emotions, sometimes it causes a bit of this freeze response. And sometimes you don't outwardly display your empathy in a way that matches your internal state. So keep that in mind. If you have a kid that you feel like doesn't have empathy, they may actually be a kid that has immense amounts of empathy, but is struggling to process the impact of how to handle all that empathy. But there are truly kids who struggle with empathy rarely do I ever feel like it means that a kid is a psychopath that's actually not a term that I've ever even used, nor would I ever use. I think these kids who are demonstrating low empathy are often lacking in perspective, taking skills. They have a hard time walking in the shoes of another person, seeing another person's perspective, understanding other people's feelings states. It doesn't mean that they are inherently bad. It means that they're lacking a skill that can be built upon. So Lauren's Quilberg is one of the most famous theorists that wrote about moral development decades ago, and he broke moral development up into three different levels. The first being something called pre-conventional morality. This is childhood stuff, especially early childhood pre-adolescence. So moral reasoning or moral decision making is based on consequences. Now, when I say the word consequences, that is often a loaded term. Consequences simply means what happens next after a behavior. The behavior occurs, what comes next is the consequence. Sometimes the consequence is a reward. The behavior is rewarded. Sometimes the consequence is a punishment. The behavior is punished. Now, for being strategic about it, we want to reward behaviors that we want to increase. You share with your brother, you get praised, or rewarding behaviors we want to see more of. We punish behaviors we want to see less of. We ignore whining, prompt a kid to use their big kid voice. These are just examples I'm throwing out there. So this theory essentially says that during childhood, pre-adolescence, the focus is really on avoiding punishment. So the kid doesn't steal the cookie from the cookie jar because they're worried that they are going to be punished, that they are going to get in trouble. They are going to be an undesirable consequence. Now there are certain types of punishment that we use all the time that is developmentally appropriate, doesn't cause any harm to our kids, but there are some punishments that include physical punishments, shame, threats, fear that we know have a negative emotional impact on our kids. So in the past, decades ago, maybe when I was being raised, when you were being raised, parents relied more on punishments like these to control kids' behavior to keep them safe and to keep cookies in the cookie jar, of course. If you think back a hundred years ago or even 50 years ago, families tended to be bigger. Kids weren't supervised as closely. Now a lot of safety risks are mediated by closer supervision. Now generally when my kids were two, they really weren't unsupervised in the kitchen for long enough periods of time that they were crawling all over the kitchen counters, getting into the glass cookie jar. If our home life was different, our life circumstances were different, there wasn't as much adult supervision. If there were more children, if we had a different value set, then we likely would have relied more on punishments, like I mentioned, in many ways, providing that higher level of supervision to preventively keep kids safe is a privilege. And it is a privilege that I had to be able to do that for my kids when they were young. So during this stage, keeping my kids safe, keeping them doing the right thing was more about prevention and that helped to keep them on the path to positive moral development. So I don't want you to hear this thinking, "Oh my gosh, I have to start doing these crazy punishments because that's the only way my kid can learn at this age." That's another topic for another day, I suppose. And this theory and this idea is probably where traditional behavior management techniques were really developed. So if we know that kids are really motivated by rewards and punishment in the early days, and that's what helps to form positive and safe behavior, then that's what we adapted to do in order to get them off to the best start. Now, rewards and punishment, we often think about like spanking punishment or taking away toys or timeouts for punishments and rewards we think about reward charts, right? Now I think there are certainly elements of rewards and punishments that have fallen out of best practices and that many of us aren't using or are not preferring, but there are also parts of rewards and punishments that we're doing all the time, like praise, for example, that's a reward, ignoring undesirable behaviors. That's punishment. So while we don't necessarily plan for it, we wouldn't necessarily call it that as parents our behavior is almost naturally shaping and molding their behavior through the way we consequence the behavior. Remember consequences just are reaction what comes next after the behavior. So in the early years, we believe that kids really behave in the way that they do because they're afraid of getting in trouble. Rules are fixed. Now you'll seek limpses of more advanced reasoning for sure, like a kid who shares a toy with a friend because the friend is sad and sharing that toy made the friend smile. So they did it because they wanted to make someone else feel good, which is a very different motivation than just being afraid of getting in trouble. So as children develop and they grow, they start to shift from this, I'm afraid of getting in trouble, motto to something that Colberg sometimes calls what's in it for me, right? So you shared that toy with your friend because you felt good when you made them smile. You got something in return, a smile. And if you've ever made someone else smile or you've ever brought joy to someone else, that is absolutely a reward. Now sometimes in the state of development and childhood, you'll see kids sort of doing something with the expectation of a favor in return. I do for you because you're going to do for me. Now that's not all good, that's not all bad. That back and forth exchange of time and attention and love and resources that happens in relationships is really important for kids to learn as they grow. Relationships are more or less a back and forth exchange. But as they get older, it becomes less transactional. So as you grow into adolescence, moral decisions become based more on social expectations. You're seeking approval from others. You're making and maintaining friendships and relationships with family. You know, you're doing something because you want to be seen as good. Good people do good things. Adolescence is a huge period of conformity. Often we make good decisions because we're looking to maintain relationships. We're looking for the approval of others. That might be in a work relationship with your boss. Keeping your job. There are many different examples. So this stage of moral development, that's really based on interpersonal relationships, some adults reach this stage and stay there. And that's as far as they go. Now there are other stages past this where some adults move to. So the next stage is called law and order orientation. So you start to understand that making moral decisions is necessary for social order. We obey laws in society to create order and stability. Now someone that reaches this stage, they're not always going to exist and make decisions within this stage, right? I'm thinking about the person who gets a speeding ticket. So a speeding ticket, that takes us back to the earliest stage, right? The reason that we don't speed is because we are afraid of getting a speeding ticket. Then you're back to stage one. This is a child like rationale. You're going to get punished if you make a mistake. If you make a bad decision of speeding. Now I recently had a conversation with the child about this and the idea of the Autobahn in Germany, where in many parts there is no speed limit. Last summer we had the experience of driving on the Autobahn and it's pretty wild how fast some of the drivers drive. We went to Germany to visit one of our former Opares and she lived with us for a year and we had talked pretty extensively about driving in Germany because it's something I found really interesting. She is one of three, she's a triplet, and she explained that driving is such a privilege in Germany that her parents actually started saving financially for the driver's license when the girls were born because it's a massive and expensive and lengthy undertaking. And you don't get a license till you're 18. So while I don't know the ins and outs of the licensing process in Germany. If I had to gather, I would say that the German drivers may be operating more on stage four law and order orientation, which means that they are following laws of safety, which means don't go crazy, don't be too wild, don't be out of control, don't be reckless because your individual decision making has an impact on the world around you. So you make decisions in driving for the sake of order, for the sake of stability of society. Rather than stage one, which I know there are a lot of American drivers who operate under this, probably internationally as well, of we don't drive too fast or too crazy because we don't want to get in trouble with the law, we don't want to get punished. So moving past that level, Colbert calls it post-conventional morality, which essentially says that our moral reasoning shifts to abstract ethical principles, right? These aren't social norms necessarily. At this stage, we believe that we should question laws if they seem unfair, if they seem unjust, that we should value individual rights. We have to carefully consider whether rules are serving society as written and give consideration to as our society changes, maybe the rules and laws need to change along with them. And that brings us to stage six, which is the Louis G. Mangione stage, essentially, which that's kind of a joke. I know I shouldn't joke about Louis G. Mangione, I think the whole internet is joking about him. But sometimes that means making a decision that's against the law because it follows your ethics, because it follows your personal value system. I don't specifically remember it, but there is this scenario around a man whose wife is dying and there is a certain medication that she needs to survive, and the ethical dilemma is he can't afford the medication, but the pharmacy has the medication behind the counter. So is it ethical for him to break into the pharmacy and steal the medication to save the life of his wife, even though he's obviously breaking laws? So in this stage, we are prioritizing justice and human dignity over the laws, or I should clarify our own definition of justice and human dignity over the laws in some ways we feel as if we are above the law and we need to take actions that supersede the law. And often, not always, probably, this may involve breaking the laws. So as I said before, we move through these stages in order, most of the time, not everyone gets all the way to the end, not everyone reaches all the levels. I don't think I'm at the last stage and I'm pretty happy not being there. So not only are morals influenced by our culture, by our religion, by our social environment, but we also are thinking at different types of critical levels about moral reasoning. We're not all operating at the same level, even as adults. So on a personal level, I will say that I don't worry too much about the moral development of my children. Maybe I should, but I read about a lot of things, but this isn't one of them. And I think generally, it's because I feel like I'm a good person, and my husband, my kid's father is a good person, and good people generally make good people. And that helps me sleep at night. So I hope you've enjoyed these thoughts for today and some of this history and some of our basic level understanding of moral development. Again, this is not the end, I'll be all not my area of expertise, but an area that I'm super interested in. Thanks so much for tuning in, I will tap with you again next month.