Thursday, April 29, 2010

How does your child make moral decisions?

One of the most under utilized bits of parenting information is Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development. I have written a couple of other articles on children's spiritual development that reference Kohlberg but not much is out there in the popular domain. This may be due to the fact that he can be hard to follow (the names for the stages can be hard to grasp intuitively) and there is some argument about theorists about the stages themselves. I believe an understanding of them can prove useful to parents as they are working to develop their children's character and will give insight into why kids make the moral decisions they do.

To be honest, I had to look up the stages to refresh my memory (hence, the clipped information below). I was playing with my three year old grandson recently and was curious about his fascination with "bad guys" and what the disciplinary rules were for our household. Neither my wife or I had said anything about verbal warnings or time out's but this was very
clipped from en.wikipedia.org
The theory holds that moral reasoning, the basis for ethical behavior, has six identifiable developmental stages, each more adequate at responding to moral dilemmas than its predecessor.
Kohlberg's six stages can be more generally grouped into three levels of two stages each: pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional.

Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)



1. Obedience and punishment orientation



(How can I avoid punishment?)





2. Self-interest orientation



(What's in it for me?)










Level 2 (Conventional)






3. Interpersonal accord and conformity



(Social norms)

(The good boy/good girl attitude)





4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation



(Law and order morality)










Level 3 (Post-Conventional)






5. Social contract orientation

6. Universal ethical principles



(Principled conscience)









The picture of human nature Kohlberg begins with is that humans are inherently communicative and capable of reason. They also possess a desire to understand others and the world around them
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