As we have been talking in class about the different theories of development and what is "normal", I can't but start to think about the different ways I have seen children. According to Scarr, every one of the children I have had contact with in many different settings have fit the notion of normal development i.e. they have learned to communicate, can interact socially, feed themselves etc. The young juveniles I see everyday that are incarcerated certainly have developed, evolutionary wise, in the normal sense. But what about the other aspects of development- developing a sense of morality for example. Piaget argues that between the ages of 4-7yrs, a child's sense of morality is black and white. My question is this: how can a child develop a sense of morality, that conforms at least minimally to social norms, if his/her parents don't instill it at an early age? If a parent does illegal/immoral behavior to feed an addiction (what ever that may be) how does a child develop a sense of what is right or wrong?
As a child matures into a young adult, does he or she eventually start to develop the sense of right or wrong or do we accept the prognosis of some that we have a segment of our society that will always be somewhat deviant in accepting the norms we all try to live by?
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I think this is an interesting topic. When I was younger, my parents were foster parents and we took in a number of children over the years who came from terrible homes. The parents of these kids were either addicts, abusive or neglectful, if not all of the above, and yet the kids were generally all great. The majority of them knew right from wrong, despite the fact that their parents led immoral/illegal lives. I think that because those kids came from unstable homes, it possibly made them even more moral, because they knew that they wanted to be different, and not take the same paths that their parents chose.
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