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Parents want their children to develop a morality that is in accord with the parents’ understanding of right and wrong. Of course, moral issues arise lifelong. A major discussion of children’s moral judgment appears in Chapter 8; drug addiction and sexual activity are covered in Chapters 10 and 11; marriage and divorce are discussed in Chapter 13; choices in dying are explained in the Epilogue. Here we highlight what young children naturally do.

Children have a sense of right and wrong, an outgrowth of bonding, attachment, and cognitive maturation. Children help and defend their parents even when the parents are abusive, and they punish other children who violate moral rules. Even infants may have a moral sense: An experiment found 6-month-olds preferring a puppet who helped another puppet, not an unhelpful one (Hamlin, 2014).

According to evolutionary theory, the survival of our species depended on protection, cooperation, and even sacrifice for one another. Humans needed group defense against harsh conditions and large predators. A moral sense evolved from that essential need to rely on other people (Dunning, 2011). That is why the body produces hormones, specifically oxytocin, to push people toward trust, love, and morality (Zak, 2012).

With the cognitive advances of early childhood, and increased interaction with peers, these innate moral emotions are strengthened. Children develop empathy, an understanding of other people’s feelings and concerns, and antipathy, a feeling of dislike or even hatred.

Empathy leads to compassion and prosocial behavior—helpfulness and kindness without any obvious personal benefit. Expressing concern, offering to share, and including a shy child in a game are examples of children’s prosocial behavior. The opposite is antisocial behavior, hurting other people.

Prosocial behavior seems to result more from emotion than from intellect, more from empathy than from theory (Eggum et al., 2011). The origins of prosocial behavior can be traced to parents who help children understand their own emotions, not from parents who tell children what emotions others might have (Brownell et al., 2013).

The link between empathy and prosocial behavior was traced longitudinally in children from 18 months to 6 years of age. Empathetic preschoolers were more likely to share, help, and play with other children in the first grade (Z. Taylor et al., 2013).

Prosocial reactions may be inborn, but they are not automatic. Some children limit empathy by “avoiding contact with the person in need [which illustrates] … the importance of emotion development and regulation in the development of prosocial behavior” and the influence of cultural norms (Trommsdorff & Cole, 2011, p. 136). Feeling distress may be a part of nature, but whether and how a child expresses it is nurture.

Antipathy leads to antisocial actions, which include verbal insults, social exclusion, and physical assaults (Calkins & Keane, 2009). An antisocial 4-year-old might look at another child, scowl, and then kick him or her hard without provocation. This can occur, but generally, children become more prosocial and less antisocial as they mature (Ramani et al., 2010).

Antisocial behavior may be innate as well (Séguin & Tremblay, 2013). Two-year-olds find it hard to share, even to let another child use a crayon that they have already used. Preschool children have a sense of ownership: A teacher’s crayon should be shared, but if a child owns it, the other children believe that he or she is allowed to be selfish (Neary & Friedman, 2014). The rules of ownership are understood by children as young as 3, who apply them quite strictly.

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At every age, antisocial behavior indicates less empathy. That may originate in the brain. An allele or gene may have gone awry (Portnoy et al., 2013). But it more directly results from parents who do not discuss or respond to emotions (Z. Taylor et al., 2013; Richards et al., 2014).

Not surprisingly, given their moral sensibilities, young children judge whether another child’s aggression is justified or not. The focus is on effects, not motives: A child who accidentally spilled water on another’s painting may be the target of that child’s justified anger.

As with adults, impulsive self-defense is more readily forgiven than is a deliberate, unprovoked attack. As young children gain in social understanding, particularly theory of mind, they gradually become better at understanding someone else’s intentions, and that makes them less likely to judge an accidental action as a hostile one (Choe et al., 2013a).

The distinction between impulse and intention is critical in deciding when and how a child’s aggression needs to be stopped. Researchers recognize four general types of aggression, each of which is evident in early childhood (see Table 6.2).

Instrumental aggression is common among 2-year-olds, who often want something and try to get it. This is called instrumental because it is a tool, or instrument, to get something that is desired. The harm in grabbing a toy, and hitting if someone resists, is not understood.

Because instrumental aggression occurs, reactive aggression also is common among young children. Almost every child reacts when hurt, whether or not the hurt was deliberate. The reaction may not be controlled—a child might punch in response to an unwelcome remark—but as the prefrontal cortex matures, the impulse to strike back becomes modified. Both instrumental aggression and reactive aggression are less often physical when children develop emotional regulation and theory of mind (Olson et al., 2011).

Relational aggression (usually verbal) destroys self-esteem and disrupts social networks, becoming more hurtful as children mature. A young child might tell another, “You can’t be my friend” or “You are fat,” hurting another’s feelings. Worse, a child might spread rumors, or tell others not to play with so-and-so. These are examples of relational aggression.’

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The fourth and most ominous type is bullying aggression, done to dominate. Bullying aggression occurs among young children but should be stopped before kindergarten, when it becomes more destructive. Not only does it destroy the self-esteem of victims, it impairs the later development of the bullies, who learn behavior habits that harm them lifelong. A 10-year-old bully may be feared and admired; a 50-year-old bully may be hated and lonely. (An in-depth discussion of bullying appears in Chapter 8.)

Aggression usually become less common from ages 2 to 6, as the brain matures and empathy increases. In addition, children learn to use aggression selectively, and that decreases both victimization and aggression (Ostrov et al., 2014). Parents, peers, and preschool teachers are pivotal mentors in this learning process.

It is a mistake to expect children to regulate their emotions on their own. If they are not guided, they may develop destructive patterns. It is also a mistake to punish aggressors too harshly because that may remove them from their zone of proximal development, where they can learn to regulate their anger.

In other words, although there is evidence that preschool children spontaneously judge others who harm people, there also is evidence that prosocial and antisocial behavior are learned (Smetana, 2013). Preschool teachers are often ideally situated to teach prosocial behavior, because aggression often arises in a social setting.

A longitudinal study found that close teacher–student relationships in preschool predicted less aggression and less victimization in elementary school. The probable reason—close relationships led children to want to please the teachers, who guided them toward prosocial, not antisocial, behavior (Runions & Shaw, 2013).

Children misbehave. They do not always do what parents want. Sometimes they do not know better, but sometimes they deliberately ignore a parent’s request, perhaps doing exactly what they have been told not to do. Since misbehavior is part of growing up, parents must respond, and their responses affect the child’s moral development.

PHYSICAL PUNISHMENT In the United States, young children are slapped, spanked, or beaten more often than are infants or older children, and more often than children in Canada or western Europe. Within the United States, frequency varies (MacKenzie et al., 2011; S. Lee et al., 2015; Lee & Altschul, 2015). Spanking is more frequent:

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Those differences do not preclude variations from one family to another: Many a secular, European American, immigrant, high-SES father in Boston spanks his child, even though most men who have all those characteristics do not.

Adults usually believe that their upbringing helped them become the person they are. For that reason, most adults tend to think that their past childhood punishment was proper. Moreover, physical punishment (called corporal punishment because it hurts the body) usually succeeds momentarily because immediately afterward children are quiet.

However, longitudinal research finds that children who are physically punished are more likely to be disobedient and to become bullies, delinquents, and then abusive adults (Gershoff et al., 2012). They are also less likely to learn quickly in school or to enroll in college (Straus & Paschall, 2009).

In fact, longitudinal research finds that children who are not spanked are more likely to develop self-control. As spanking increases, so does misbehavior (Gershoff, 2013). The correlation between spanking and later aggression holds for children of all ethnic groups.

In 33 nations (mostly in Europe), corporal punishment is illegal; in many nations on other continents, it is the norm. In the United States, parents use it often. In schools, teachers may legally paddle children in 19 of the 50 states. Overall, in one recent year, 218,466 children were corporally punished at school, 16 percent of whom had been designated as having an intellectual disability. Further, a disproportionate number of the paddled children are African American boys. These data raise questions about fairness and justice (Morones, 2013; Gershoff et al., 2015).

Although some adults believe that physical punishment will “teach a lesson” of obedience, the lesson that children learn may be that “might makes right.” When they become bigger and stronger, children who have been physically disciplined tend to use corporal punishment on others—their classmates, their wives or husbands, their children.

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Many studies of children from all family constellations and backgrounds find that physical punishment of young children correlates with delayed theory of mind and increased aggression (Olson et al., 2011). To prove cause without a doubt would require parents of monozygotic twins to raise them identically, except that one twin would be spanked often and the other never. Of course, that is unethical as well as impossible.

Nonetheless, most developmentalists wonder why parents would take the chance. The best argument in favor of spanking is that alternative punishments may be worse (Larzelere et al., 2010; Larzelere & Cox, 2013). Let us consider alternatives.

PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTROL Another common method of discipline is called psychological control, in which children’s shame, guilt, and gratitude are used to control their behavior (Barber, 2002). Psychological control may reduce academic achievement and emotional understanding, just as spanking is thought to do (Alegre, 2011).

Consider Finland, one of the nations where corporal punishment is now forbidden. Parents were asked about psychological control (Aunola et al., 2013). If parents strongly agreed with the following questions, they were considered to use psychological control:

The higher the parents scored on these four measures of psychological control, the lower the children’s math scores were—and this connection grew stronger over time. Moreover, the children tended to have negative emotions (depression, anger, and so on). Thus, psychological control may have some of the same consequences as corporal punishment.

TIME-OUT AND INDUCTION A disciplinary technique often used with young children in North America is the time-out, in which a misbehaving child is required to sit quietly, without toys or playmates, for a short time. Time-out is not to be done in anger, or for too long; it is recommended that parents use a calm voice and that the time-out last only one to five minutes (Morawska & Sanders, 2011). Time-out works as a punishment if the child really enjoys “time-in,” when the child is happily engaged with the parents or with peers.

Time-out is favored by many experts. For example, in the large, longitudinal evaluation of the Head Start program highlighted in Chapter 5, an increase in time-outs and a decrease in spankings were considered signs of improved parental discipline (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010).

However, the same team who criticized the correlation between spanking and misbehavior also criticized the quality of research favoring time-out. They added that time-out did not always work: If “misbehavior is motivated by wanting to escape from the situation … time-out reinforces the misbehavior” (Larzelere & Cox, 2013, p. 289).

Often combined with the time-out is another alternative to physical punishment and psychological control—induction, in which the parents talk extensively with the offender, helping children understand why their behavior was wrong.

Ideally, time-out allows children to calm down. Then a strong and affectionate parent–child relationship means that children explain their emotions and parents listen carefully. Children can explain what they might have done instead of what was done, although such hypothetical reasoning is difficult—maybe impossible—for young children.

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Thus, induction may help children internalize morality, but it takes time and patience. Since 3-year-olds confuse causes with consequences, they cannot answer an angry “Why did you do that?” or appreciate a long explanation.

Simple induction (“Why did he cry?”) may be more appropriate, but even that is hard before a child develops theory of mind. Nonetheless, induction seems to pay off over time. Children whose parents used induction when they were 3-year-olds became children with fewer externalizing problems in elementary school (Choe et al., 2013b).