ABSTRACT
Children face moral issues within their families from very early in their lives. The tensions between a child’s own desires and needs, and issues of control, discipline, reciprocity, justice and rights, obligation, and thewelfare of others are daily experienced and negotiated with other familymembers.Young children’s parents and siblings talk every day to children and to each other about why people behave and feel the way they do; about what is allowed and what is not; about moral matters pertaining to welfare, fairness, and property rights; and about social rules that reflect the conventional precepts of the particular social system within which the child is growing up. And from their second year, children participate in (and indeed initiate) such conversations with increasing frequency (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Dunn, 1988; Tizard & Hughes, 2002). Some of these family discussions focus on relatively minor social rules, some are urgent matters of other people’s welfare and rights; some are culture-wide, and some more local issues of practices within the family. Children even in their early years have views on the permissibility of actions, and provide justifications for their views, and they distinguish between different domains of morality and convention (Much & Shweder, 1978; Slomkowski & Killen, 1992; Smetana, 1989; Turiel, 2002).
