ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to demonstrate that a focus on narratives affords unique opportunities for studying children's moral lives as well as the process of moral development. It considers the dual potential of narratives for serving as a window into children's current moral understandings and for prospectively shaping new understandings. Youths' narratives afford a distinct window into the changing quality of their experiences of moral transgression and repair across development. The chapter discusses the uniqueness of a narrative approach for illuminating the richness of children's everyday moral interactions and the disparate perspectives from which children may experience those events and learn from them. It describes the scaffolding of narratives as a form of moral socialization and gives attention to the exceptional promise of narration for elucidating the scope and development of individual differences in moral lives. The chapter concludes by discussing narrative truth and its bearing on moral development.
