Customer Reviews

The Moral Life of Children

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A truly remarkable book that debunks the reductionism of social scientific and (to a somewhat lesser degree) psychoanalytic thinking with regard to the astonishing complexity of morality in thought, word, deed. Through discussions with children in the U.S. and Brazil he illustrates how difficult it is to completely understand or delineate morality however it may seem to manifest; how much its development is affected by and affects its social context; and the significance and malleabilty of religious beliefs. His respect and even reverence for the children he meets and describes is a beautiful thing. Despite new heights of Manichean reductionism in our current political scene, this book's discussions of the civil rights struggle, poverty in Brazil, and nuclear weapons are timeless. Worth reading and re-reading, and thinking about at deeper and deeper levels. Thank you, Dr. Coles. I look forward to reading many more of your books.

I think we all agree that we would like to be good and moral people and to raise children who are good and moral. I have some problems around Coles' ideas of how to achieve this. He disregards well-researched principles of infant psychology, e.g. that a parent cannot really "spoil" a newborn baby. Nowhere does he refer to the research of people like Bowlby, who have found an association between secure attachment between parent and infant, and psychological health of the child.