How Parents Communicate Right and Wrong: A Study of Memorable Moral Messages Recalled by Emerging Adults

Abstract

The family communication process through which emerging adults form their moral outlook is examined through the lenses of Negotiated Morality Theory and Vygotskian Developmental Theory. Analyses were performed on the context, content, and type of 470 memorable messages reported by 303 emerging adults. Results indicated that messages were spontaneously delivered rather than planned, communicated at home, and received at around 16 years of age. Messages most often concerned relational ethics, self-honoring, honesty/fraudulence, careless/harmful acts, and personal qualities. Eleven distinct forms of communication were used by parents, including forecasting the future, empathy-enhancing, virtue-prioritizing, commanding, and identity-making. As expected, the nature of the messages varied by the gender of the parent and the age of the child at the time of the message. Parental messages appear to be influential as young adults negotiate cultural, religious, and peer sources of morality. Implications for parents and moral educators are explored.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Via Tarachiu and Frank Garcia for their research assistance.

Notes

¹ We recognize that moral/ethical dimensions of communication have been a central focus of the larger field of communication scholarship both historically and recently (see Arnett, Fritz, & Bell, 2009; Christians & Merrill, 2009).

² Emerging adulthood has been proposed as a postadolescent period of life experienced by members of postindustrial societies (Arnett, 2004). Typically defined as the period from 18 years of age to the mid-20s, this time of life offers young people presumably unprecedented opportunities to explore identities, relationships and careers. It is thought to be a time of instability, feeling in-between adolescence and adulthood, and self-development. The emerging adulthood concept has received considerable criticism (e.g., Côté & Bynner, 2007) for, among other matters, its assumption that young people experience this period as a developmental opportunity rather than a period of dislocation imposed by unfavorable economic forces.