The interactive roles of parenting, emotion regulation and executive functioning in moral reasoning during middle childhood

Abstract

We examined mother-child cooperative behavior, children’s emotion regulation and executive function, as well as combinations of these factors, as predictors of moral reasoning in 89 10-year-old children. Dyadic cooperation was coded from videotaped observations of laboratory puzzle and speech tasks. Emotion regulation was derived from maternal report, and executive functioning was assessed with the Tower of London task. Moral reasoning was coded during mother-child conversations about morally ambiguous, peer-conflict situations. Two significant interactions indicated that children from more cooperative dyads who also had higher executive function skills had higher moral reasoning scores than other children, and children lower in both emotion regulation and executive function had lower moral reasoning scores than other children. The results contribute to the literature on the multiple and interactive levels of influence on moral reasoning in childhood.

In Sync and in Control: A Meta‐Analysis of Parent–Child Positive Behavioral Synchrony and Youth Self‐Regulation

“…Consistently, empirical research has demonstrated that parent–child positive synchrony is associated with children's adaptive self‐regulation, with effect sizes ranging from small to large (Kochanska et al., ; Laible & Thompson, ; Suveg, Shaffer, & Davis, ). These results have been replicated across several types of synchrony (e.g., shared positive affect, cooperation on a task; Hinnant, Nelson, O'Brien, Keane, & Calkins, ; Kochanska, Aksan, & Koenig, ) and self‐regulation (e.g., effortful control, committed compliance; Laible & Thompson, ; Pesonen et al., ).…”

The role of paternal mind‐mindedness in preschoolers' self‐regulated conduct

“…Despite being frequently proposed as a major driving force of early moral development, parenting has received little empirical attention in this literature (Hinnant et al, 2013;Malti et al, 2013). Parent-child interactions constitute mutual and reciprocal forces of socialization that promote cooperation between children and their caregivers (Kochanska & Thompson, 1997), and the quality of this cooperation is believed to support and promote the emergence of self-regulated conduct (Thompson, 2014).…”

“…When children are approximately 2 years of age, parents gradually expand their focus from primary care to incorporate educational components, for instance, teaching their children rules of behaviour; children thus begin to distinguish right from wrong and begin to regulate their behaviour in line with this understanding (Lamb & Lewis, 2004). There is, however, surprisingly little empirical support for this proposition (Hinnant, Nelson, O'Brien, Keane, & Calkins, 2013;Malti, Eisenberg, Kim, & Buchmann, 2013), and even less concerning the specific role of fathers (Grusec, Chaparro, Johnston, & Sherman, 2014). There is, however, surprisingly little empirical support for this proposition (Hinnant, Nelson, O'Brien, Keane, & Calkins, 2013;Malti, Eisenberg, Kim, & Buchmann, 2013), and even less concerning the specific role of fathers (Grusec, Chaparro, Johnston, & Sherman, 2014).…”

Children’s giving: moral reasoning and moral emotions in the development of donation behaviors

“…The use of moral reasoning to justify actions or resolve moral dilemmas, as compared to reasoning based on sanctions, hedonistic or self-serving considerations, has also been demonstrated to predict specific types of prosocial responding in children, such as sharing, helping, and cooperation (Larrieu and Mussen, 1986; Miller et al, 1996; Stewart and McBride-Chang, 2000; Hinnant et al, 2013). Together, moral reasoning and moral emotions, such as sympathy and guilt, have been theorized to play an important role in the early development of moral action tendencies and the consideration of others’ welfare (Hoffman, 2000; Arsenio, 2014; Malti and Ongley, 2014).…”