Moral development concepts and theories

¶ … Moral Developoment

Power assertion is a method of socialization designed to gain compliance through coercion, pressure, forceful insistence, and/or a negative or critical interaction style. A common method of power assertion is disciplinary spanking. Although power assertion can be effective in gaining a type of compliance (situational) it often does not generalize. In addition, gaining compliance in this manner is not the same as getting a committed change from the child. One of the biggest problems with power assertion is that children will learn to try and avoid this type of socialization as opposed to actually commit to whatever the parent is trying to get the child to learn or do. Such avoidance can be overt such as simply avoiding a parent or caregiver who is about to employ this method or more covert in nature where the child simply complies outwardly but maintains internal representations of noncompliance.

Love withdrawal is relatively self-explanatory and is in a sense an extension of power assertion. In this technique the parent imposes conditions of worth to a child by overtly or covertly withdrawing their love for the child when the child does not act in accordance with parent's specifications. These conditions of worth are often internalized by the child who then believes that their own value is determined externally by the way others react to them.

There are several issues with these methods most severe being that children internalize them as a means to interact with others. Children model their parents' interactions with them in their interactions with others. Essentially what happens is the child learns from the parents concerning what they believe is acceptable behavior and what the goals of interacting with other people in society should consist of. These two methods of socialization distance the child and remove feelings of empathy, positive regard, and genuineness towards others and stagnate the development of morals in favor of the development of self-interest. Induction does just the opposite by pointing out the effects of the child's behavior on others, thus sensitizing them to the need to consider how their behavior influences the feelings and behavior of the people.

Children are not passive entities that are unaware of their needs or of how their environment can be manipulated in order to meet their needs. Styles attachment often represent reciprocal interactions between the parent and child. For example, the child with a resistant attachment who becomes highly upset when the parent leaves but shows little interest in the parent when they return is often associated with a lack of parental affection. The children recognizes the parent as a source of security; however, since they receive little affection from the parent when the parent is present they learn not to approach the parent.

The child with an avoidant attachment style often treats the parent and strangers similarly. Often these children receive very little interaction with the parent when the parent is present and they have learned not to rely on them for stimulation. Likewise this lack of interaction does not allow the child to differentiate well between a stranger and their own parent other than having some form of mild familiarity with the parent.

The child with the disorganized attachment style exhibits no consistent behavioral pattern in the stranger situation. This child attachment is often thought to be due to the child either experiencing the parent as frightening or inconsistent in their approach to the child or the child is frightened by the parent. In either one of these scenarios it is also hypothesized that the parent's behavior towards the child is either inconsistent or frightening as well resulting in this lack of a consistent behavioral pattern or attachment style.