Raising a Moral Child

What does it take to be a good parent?
We know some of the tricks for
teaching kids to become high
achievers. For example, research
suggests that when parents praise effort
rather than ability, children develop a
stronger work ethic and become more
motivated.
Yet although some parents live
vicariously through their children’s
accomplishments, success is not the No.
1 priority for most parents. We’re much
more concerned about our children
becoming kind, compassionate and
helpful. Surveys reveal that in the
United States, parents from European,
Asian, Hispanic and African ethnic
groups all place far greater importance
on caring than achievement. These
patterns hold around the world: When
people in 50 countries were asked to
report their guiding principles in life,
the value that mattered most was not
achievement, but caring.
Despite the significance that it holds in
our lives, teaching children to care
about others is no simple task. In an
Israeli study of nearly 600 families,
parents who valued kindness and
compassion frequently failed to raise
children who shared those values.
Are some children simply good-natured
— or not? For the past decade, I’ve
been studying the surprising success of
people who frequently help others
without any strings attached. As the
father of two daughters and a son, I’ve
become increasingly curious about how
these generous tendencies develop.
Genetic twin studies suggest that
anywhere from a quarter to more than
half of our propensity to be giving and
caring is inherited. That leaves a lot of
room for nurture, and the evidence on
how parents raise kind and
compassionate children flies in the face
of what many of even the most well-
intentioned parents do in praising good
behavior, responding to bad behavior,
and communicating their values.
By age 2, children experience some
moral emotions — feelings triggered by
right and wrong. To reinforce caring as
the right behavior, research indicates ,
praise is more effective than rewards.
Rewards run the risk of leading
children to be kind only when a carrot
is offered, whereas praise
communicates that sharing is
intrinsically worthwhile for its own
sake. But what kind of praise should
we give when our children show early
signs of generosity?
Many parents believe it’s important to
compliment the behavior, not the child
— that way, the child learns to repeat
the behavior. Indeed, I know one
couple who are careful to say, “That
was such a helpful thing to do,” instead
of, “You’re a helpful person.”
But is that the right approach? In a
clever experiment, the researchers Joan
E. Grusec and Erica Redler set out to
investigate what happens when we
commend generous behavior versus
generous character. After 7- and 8-year-
olds won marbles and donated some to
poor children, the experimenter
remarked, “Gee, you shared quite a
bit.”
The researchers randomly assigned the
children to receive different types of
praise. For some of the children, they
praised the action: “It was good that
you gave some of your marbles to those
poor children. Yes, that was a nice and
helpful thing to do.” For others, they
praised the character behind the
action: “I guess you’re the kind of
person who likes to help others
whenever you can. Yes, you are a very
nice and helpful person.”
A couple of weeks later, when faced
with more opportunities to give and
share, the children were much more
generous after their character had been
praised than after their actions had
been. Praising their character helped
them internalize it as part of their
identities. The children learned who
they were from observing their own
actions: I am a helpful person. This
dovetails with new research led by the
psychologist Christopher J. Bryan, who
finds that for moral behaviors, nouns
work better than verbs. To get 3- to 6-
year-olds to help with a task, rather
than inviting them “to help,” it was 22
to 29 percent more effective to
encourage them to “be a helper.”
Cheating was cut in half when instead
of, “Please don’t cheat,” participants
were told, “Please don’t be a cheater.”
When our actions become a reflection
of our character, we lean more heavily
toward the moral and generous
choices. Over time it can become part
of us.
Praise appears to be particularly
influential in the critical periods when
children develop a stronger sense of
identity. When the researchers Joan E.
Grusec and Erica Redler praised the
character of 5-year-olds, any benefits
that may have emerged didn’t have a
lasting impact: They may have been too
young to internalize moral character as
part of a stable sense of self. And by
the time children turned 10, the
differences between praising character
and praising actions vanished: Both
were effective. Tying generosity to
character appears to matter most
around age 8, when children may be
starting to crystallize notions of
identity.
Praise in response to good behavior
may be half the battle, but our
responses to bad behavior have
consequences, too. When children
cause harm, they typically feel one of
two moral emotions: shame or guilt.
Despite the common belief that these
emotions are interchangeable, research
led by the psychologist June Price
Tangney reveals that they have very
different causes and consequences.
Shame is the feeling that I am a bad
person, whereas guilt is the feeling that
I have done a bad thing. Shame is a
negative judgment about the core self,
which is devastating: Shame makes
children feel small and worthless, and
they respond either by lashing out at
the target or escaping the situation
altogether. In contrast, guilt is a
negative judgment about an action,
which can be repaired by good
behavior. When children feel guilt, they
tend to experience remorse and regret,
empathize with the person they have
harmed, and aim to make it right.
In one study spearheaded by the
psychologist Karen Caplovitz Barrett ,
parents rated their toddlers’ tendencies
to experience shame and guilt at home.
The toddlers received a rag doll, and
the leg fell off while they were playing
with it alone. The shame-prone
toddlers avoided the researcher and
did not volunteer that they broke the
doll. The guilt-prone toddlers were
more likely to fix the doll, approach
the experimenter, and explain what
happened. The ashamed toddlers were
avoiders; the guilty toddlers were
amenders.
If we want our children to care about
others, we need to teach them to feel
guilt rather than shame when they
misbehave. In a review of research on
emotions and moral development, the
psychologist Nancy Eisenberg suggests
that shame emerges when parents
express anger, withdraw their love, or
try to assert their power through
threats of punishment: Children may
begin to believe that they are bad
people. Fearing this effect, some
parents fail to exercise discipline at all,
which can hinder the development of
strong moral standards.
The most effective response to bad
behavior is to express disappointment.
According to independent reviews by
Professor Eisenberg and David R.
Shaffer , parents raise caring children
by expressing disappointment and
explaining why the behavior was
wrong, how it affected others, and how
they can rectify the situation. This
enables children to develop standards
for judging their actions, feelings of
empathy and responsibility for others,
and a sense of moral identity , which
are conducive to becoming a helpful
person . The beauty of expressing
disappointment is that it communicates
disapproval of the bad behavior,
coupled with high expectations and the
potential for improvement: “You’re a
good person, even if you did a bad
thing, and I know you can do better.”
As powerful as it is to criticize bad
behavior and praise good character,
raising a generous child involves more
than waiting for opportunities to react
to the actions of our children. As
parents, we want to be proactive in
communicating our values to our
children. Yet many of us do this the
wrong way.
In a classic experiment , the
psychologist J. Philippe Rushton gave
140 elementary- and middle-school-age
children tokens for winning a game,
which they could keep entirely or
donate some to a child in poverty. They
first watched a teacher figure play the
game either selfishly or generously, and
then preach to them the value of
taking, giving or neither. The adult’s
influence was significant: Actions spoke
louder than words. When the adult
behaved selfishly, children followed
suit. The words didn’t make much
difference — children gave fewer
tokens after observing the adult’s
selfish actions, regardless of whether
the adult verbally advocated
selfishness or generosity. When the
adult acted generously, students gave
the same amount whether generosity
was preached or not — they donated 85
percent more than the norm in both
cases. When the adult preached
selfishness, even after the adult acted
generously, the students still gave 49
percent more than the norm. Children
learn generosity not by listening to
what their role models say, but by
observing what they do.
To test whether these role-modeling
effects persisted over time, two months
later researchers observed the children
playing the game again. Would the
modeling or the preaching influence
whether the children gave — and
would they even remember it from two
months earlier?
The most generous children were those
who watched the teacher give but not
say anything. Two months later, these
children were 31 percent more
generous than those who observed the
same behavior but also heard it
preached. The message from this
research is loud and clear: If you don’t
model generosity, preaching it may not
help in the short run, and in the long
run, preaching is less effective than
giving while saying nothing at all.
People often believe that character
causes action, but when it comes to
producing moral children, we need to
remember that action also shapes
character. As the psychologist Karl
Weick is fond of asking, “How can I
know who I am until I see what I do?
How can I know what I value until I see
where I walk?”
Adam Grant is a professor of
management and psychology at the
Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania and the author of “Give
and Take: Why Helping Others Drives
Our Success.”