The Moral Intelligence of Children: How to Raise a Moral Child

by Robert Coles

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The question is more relevant now than ever before: what makes someone a moral person?

Child psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles has dedicated much of his life to exemplifying, teaching, and writing about the moral life. Here, Coles illuminates the ways in which children become moral or not so moral adults, drawing on case studies, talks with parents, visits to nurseries and classrooms, and interviews with children. No subject could be more important and more timely—for all Americans, but especially for parents. In the tradition of such bestsellers as Cultural Literacy and Emotional Intelligence, The Moral Intelligence of Children identifies a new type of intelligence essential for success and fulfillment in life. It will be used by parents and teachers for years to come as the authoritative guide to children's moral development.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780452279377
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/01/1998
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.26(w) x 7.97(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Robert Coles is professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School and a research psychiatrist for the Harvard University Health Services. He has written over 50 books, including the Pulitzer prize-winning five-volume Children of Crisis and the bestselling The Spiritual Life of Children. The James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard, he also teaches at Duke University during the spring semester, where he devotes much of his energy to the magazine DoubleTake, which he founded in 1995 and which is still based at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies.

Table of Contents

Preface

I. Moral Intelligence
1. The Moral Imagination: Witnesses
2. The Good Person
3. A Not-so-Good Person: Moral Undertow
4. Moral Crossroads - Bad Behavior, Bad "Witnesses"

II. The Moral Archaeology of Childhood
1. The Early Years
2. The Elementary School Years: The Age of Conscience
3. Adolescence

III. Letter to Parents and Teachers

Appendix
Index

Editorial Reviews

An inspiring book that is full of stories, examples, and provocative ideas that help the reader think differently about the important role adults play in shaping a child’s moral intelligence. Cole’s style of writing and use of case study examples and personal experiences is a delightful and effective way to illustrate such an abstract concept. This book should be read by parents, teachers, and clinicians.”—Valerie Maholmes, The American Journal of Psychiatry
 
“Written with his customary acute perceptiveness, this important inquiry will enlighten parents, teachers and caregivers concerned with children's moral intelligence.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“Coles' energy and intellectual reach by themselves have earned him public notice, but other qualities—such as clear prose and good taste in the prose of others, especially Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor—have attracted a far wider audience than the jargon-spewing social scientists and language-hating literary critics of present-day academia could ever hope to enjoy… With unaffected reverence for the Golden Rule, Coles, as it were, lifts the child off the analyst's couch and deposits him back in the home. He urges us—particularly us parents—to see our children as morally educable, even when they're babies, and not just as primitive masses of conflicting emotions and needs.”—John R. MacArthur, Los Angeles Times
 
“There are two especially noteworthy features to Coles’s argument. First, moral character is shaped from infancy through adolescence through witnessing the conduct and caring of others and through moral conversations. In this way, certain moral qualities, such as empathy, are nurtured or thwarted.”—Larry Hultgren, Metapsychology
 
“Intelligent, accessible and compelling, The Moral Intelligence of Children effectively captures the challenge, for children and parents alike, of struggling with life’s ironies and ambiguities.”—People

From the Publisher

Child psychiatrist Coles, who won a Pulitzer for The Spiritual Life of Children, now tackles the daunting subject of how parents, relatives and teachers give shape to children's moral values and behavior. Drawing on case studies, talks with parent groups, visits to nurseries and classrooms and interviews with children, the Harvard Medical School professor demonstrates that character develops from the very start of life and throughout adolescence, molded by parents' often unself-conscious moral guidance. Further, he documents that children have an innate moral curiosity, a hunger for adults to tell them how they should behave in various situations, and why. The shared, daily experience between emotionally connected adults and their children seems to be the crucial factor in instilling a well-developed moral sense, as underscored by Coles's tales of absent, detached or hurtful parents who raise destructively self-absorbed or morally adrift youth. Written with his customary acute perceptiveness, this important inquiry will enlighten parents, teachers and caregivers concerned with children's moral intelligence.

Publishers Weekly

Coles, psychiatrist, professor, and author of many popular and respected psychology titles (e.g., Spiritual Life of Children, LJ 11/1/90; Their Eyes Meeting the World, LJ 10/1/92; The Call of Service, LJ 9/1/93; and The Mind's Fate, LJ 7/95), considers the moral conduct of children in his latest book. Children learn to conduct their lives morally by observing and imitating adults and each other, according to Coles, and his study helps the reader understand how this moral learning occurs. In addition to introductory and concluding sections, the text is divided into three parts: early childhood, elementary school years, and adolescence. Through examples, Coles suggests to parents, teachers, and others how teaching "character" can be built into child rearing. Written with sensitivity and understanding, Coles's latest offering is recommended for all libraries.
— Kay Brodie, Chesapeake College Library, Wye Mills, MD

Library Journal

The prolific Coles, Harvard's noted social ethicist and author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning five-volume Children of Crisis, muddies the ethical waters conceptually in this rather loosely organized guide on raising a child to be a moral person.

Linking morality to general character development, to "goodness," rather than to specific issues of ethical attitudes and behavior, Coles meanders from topic to topic, discussing such matters as the process by which young people develop a worldview and manners, how career choices emerge, the nature of sociability in the young, and the origins of spirituality. Coles has a penchant for rhetorical overdrive, resulting in too many run-on sentences (one tops out at 138 words). Readers may feel that he quotes too liberally from his mentor, Anna Freud, and that he relies too frequently on excerpts from transcripts of group discussions he has held with parents, adolescents, and children. Finally, Coles sometimes states as a seemingly fresh perception concepts that have been in circulation for years, such as the idea that children, particularly adolescents, need and hunger for moral values and limits, that they often feel alienated or lost without such values, and that parents and teachers best impart these values through the day-to-day manifestations of empathy, kindness, and similar forms of sensitivity to others rather than through preaching or nagging. To be sure, Coles does glean some telling comments from young people. An adolescent girl, fed up with her parents' obsessive fretting about her possible romantic and sexual entanglements with boys, says shrewdly, "I wish my parents would stop turning me into one more reason not to worry about themselves."

In general, however, Coles has considered the issues raised in this book more profitably in a host of earlier works, particularly The Moral Life of Children (1985) and The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (1988). He has little to add here.

Kirkus Reviews