The Moral Child (1988) by William Damon

When

Like Damon’s first book, I read this during my doctoral studies.

Why

As mentioned concerning the first book, Damon’s work is influential in my teaching and scholarship.

How

In addition to his constructivist approach to social and moral development, I appreciate the role he gives parents and adults in children’s social and moral development. For various reasons, I think constructivist approaches are sometimes viewed as entirely child-centered at the expense of parents/adult caregivers. This is not the case, at least for the approaches I lean on in my work. I also appreciate how, in this book, he draws on relatively recent research at the time bearing on children’s emotional development in areas such as empathy and child-parent attachment.