Preschoolers’ gap in understanding of moral and prudential transgressions in real-life parent–child encounters

ABSTRACT

This paper reports young (3–5 year-olds’) children’s cognitive and affective understanding of actual moral (harm to others) and prudential (harm to self) transgressions in the family, as reported by the parent, but in a way that provides the child the opportunity to reflect on and reason about the actual events. A total of 38 parent–child dyads participated. Findings illuminate different levels of moral understanding during preschool years. Specifically, there was a sharp break between the understanding of 3 and 4–5 year-olds for both transgressions. However, across all age groups, the rate of increased relevance of the reasoning to the act was greater for prudential than for moral transgressions, and the understanding of own feelings as an agent of the transgression developed more slowly in the moral than the prudential domains. Unexpectedly, many 3 year-olds failed to understand the dangers inherent in prudential transgressions.

KEYWORDS:

• Early moral development
• prudential transgressions
• parent–child relations

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Vienna Messina and SUNY Oneonta undergraduate research assistants for their assistance in recruiting the participants and collecting and coding the data. We thank the directors and teachers of participated preschools in Upstate New York, and the parents of preschool participants, and all participants for their cooperation and time.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This distinction bears some similarity to studies of interesting developmental differences in children’s different levels of cognitive understanding (e.g Munakata & Yerys, 2001; Woolley, 2006). However, our findings do not involve differences in modalities but rather in the specific wording of responses.

2 We took theoretical support for the use of parental diaries from Nelson’s theory of autobiographical memory (Nelson, 2003) and considered the reported transgressions revealing culturally and idiosyncratically significant meanings for the families.

3 This is somewhat reminiscent of what Arsenio et al. (Arsenio, 2010; Arsenio & Kramer, 1992) have termed the ‘happy victimizer’ phenomenon accounting for the immediate action or overt situation, but not accounting for morally relevant accounts.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Leave Program, New York State United University Professions [Grand no. 92-DRESCHER-2019], Research Foundation for the State University of New York [Grand no. #1037431-18/19], and Faculty Development Funds by SUNY Oneonta awarded to the first author.

Notes on contributors

Yoko Takagi

Yoko Takagi is an Assistant Professor at SUNY Oneonta. Research includes moral development from early childhood through adolescence and young adulthood, parent–child relations, and cross-cultural studies of social and moral development.

Herbert D. Saltzstein

Herbert D. Saltzstein is a Professor Emeritus at CUNY Graduate Center. Research includes children’s and adolescents’ moral development and children’s eyewitness identification.