Heteronomous Stages Affecting Children's Moral Development
How do we teach morals to children? Almost all people who work with children want to instill morals in them so that they have a good foundation to become good people. However, do we know how and understand why we help foster children’s moral development? There are different activities and strategies that I have used to help develop children’s morals that have a theoretical foundation. According to Piaget, he thought that children’s moral development happened in two stages: Heteronomous (5 to 8 yrs. old) and Morality of cooperation (9+ yrs. old). The Heteronomous stage is when a child views the rules from an authority figure and it the rule is constant and the child needs to follow it. I have used this theory with my two-year-olds that
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The domain approach is more focused on how a child learns moral imperatives, social conventions, and matters of personal choice. “Children arrive at these distinctions early, displaying more advanced moral reasoning than assumed by the externally controlled vision of Kohlberg’s preconventional morality” (Berk, 2013, p. 510). This theory is more about the social relationships that the children have over their cognitive development. Meal times is one of the best examples of this theory. We serve our meals family style: breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack. The children are learning how to use their manners, they are saying “please” and “thank you”. How to wait their turn and to put the food back to the middle of the table for their friends. Some of my older toddlers even ask the child sitting next to them if they would like some food or tell them that it is their turn. We as the teachers have done a lot of modeling of these behaviors for the children. By modeling appropriate social behaviors, the children will grow to have a better moral understanding. We model kindness, understanding, caring, and empathy in different ways. We model these behaviors by helping each other clean up a mess that they have made, helping a friend when they are hurt, sharing toys with each other, and taking care of our classroom pet guinea pig, Spike. Having Spike in our classroom has taught the children to give attention to someone else besides themselves and gives the children something to care
The domain approach is more focused on how a child learns moral imperatives, social conventions, and matters of personal choice. “Children arrive at these distinctions early, displaying more advanced moral reasoning than assumed by the externally controlled vision of Kohlberg’s preconventional morality” (Berk, 2013, p. 510). This theory is more about the social relationships that the children have over their cognitive development. Meal times is one of the best examples of this theory. We serve our meals family style: breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack. The children are learning how to use their manners, they are saying “please” and “thank you”. How to wait their turn and to put the food back to the middle of the table for their friends. Some of my older toddlers even ask the child sitting next to them if they would like some food or tell them that it is their turn. We as the teachers have done a lot of modeling of these behaviors for the children. By modeling appropriate social behaviors, the children will grow to have a better moral understanding. We model kindness, understanding, caring, and empathy in different ways. We model these behaviors by helping each other clean up a mess that they have made, helping a friend when they are hurt, sharing toys with each other, and taking care of our classroom pet guinea pig, Spike. Having Spike in our classroom has taught the children to give attention to someone else besides themselves and gives the children something to care