![]() Even as adults, she said, we deal with ethical dilemmas, in which doing something to help one person may hurt another person, and there’s no clear right answer. Malti describes the next steps of moral development as a “lifelong process” of developing empathy and weighing intention in complicated situations, which is known as post-conventional moral thinking. “Young kids acquire rules, but then over-generalize them - they apply those rules to everything,” said Tina Malti, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, and director of the Laboratory for Social-Emotional Development and Intervention.ĭr. Hunter said.Ĭhildren in elementary school are working on conventional development, which involves learning about societal rules and the emotions behind those rules. Preschoolers are mostly in the pre-conventional stage: They know what is right and wrong, but they are motivated to do “right” because of fear of punishment or desire for reward, Dr. Building on Piaget’s ideas, a psychologist named Lawrence Kohlberg observed three levels of moral development: pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional. “Everything is very black-and-white, and they may struggle to distinguish what is a minor rule-breaking situation and what is a major rule-breaking situation,” said Sally Beville Hunter, a clinical associate professor of child and family studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.Īlongside cognitive development, children are working on the development of their moral compass. The pioneering psychologist Jean Piaget observed that children who are roughly 7 to 11 are able to apply logic to concrete, or real life, situations but they struggle to apply their knowledge to hypotheticals. ![]() It turns out children who are roughly elementary-school age are in a phase of cognitive development called the concrete operational stage, and at the same time, they are embarking on a journey of moral reasoning that will be ongoing for the rest of their lives. Other parents of 7- and 8-year-olds have told me about similar experiences (“Why is my daughter such a narc?” one mom asked), so I checked in with three psychologists to find out what’s going on, developmentally, for kids in this age group. She also loves to impose her definition of “truth” on her little sister, informing me and her father immediately when her sister falls short of her outsize expectations. ![]() ![]() She frequently accuses meteorologists of “lying” because the weather report is not accurate, and I gently explain to her that they’re not lying, they’re just … wrong. ![]() Once I described something as “snobby” within her earshot and she hit me with a barrage of questions, “Why is it snobby? What did you mean by that? Why did you say it if you didn’t really mean it?” Until she broke me and I told her exactly why I had said it (because something was very expensive and I was being judgmental and a little rude).īecause she is 8, the downside to her desire for accuracy is that she does not fully understand intention. Talking to her sometimes feels like being cross-examined by the world’s smallest and cutest litigator. My older daughter is obsessed with the truth. ![]()
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