Happiness is one of the most important parenting goals in today's modern society. To promote a happy childhood, we need to understand what happiness means to children. Contrary to the view that young children may equate happiness with satisfying material desires and experiencing simple pleasures, in this article, I review recent developmental…

The emergence of moral emotions such as guilt is central in moral and prosocial development. Guilt is an important psychological factor, which motivates prosocial behaviour and is credited for multiple social functions. Importantly, it remains unclear what determines the extent to which children show guilt. The current study examined two factors…

Adults use an individual's behavior in one moral subdomain to make inferences about how they will act in another moral subdomain, reflecting a tendency to attribute underlying traits to individuals. We recruited 4- to 7-year-old children from a large city in North America to investigate their ability to generalize from one moral subdomain to…

Social exclusion, a pervasive and impactful phenomenon particularly prominent during preadolescence, has traditionally been construed through a moral deficiency lens. This study departs from prevailing research trends, casting a novel light on the phenomenon in the context of normative moral development. It elucidates the role of social exclusion…

Given the value placed on honesty and the negative consequences of lying, encouraging children's truth-telling is important. The present investigation assessed honesty promotion techniques for encouraging 3-8-year-old Canadian children's (Study 1: n = 301, 54% female; Study 2: n = 229, 50% female from predominantly White middle-class samples)…

This study aimed to examine children's perceptions regarding the concepts of benevolence and responsibility in early childhood and the way they put them into practice. The study was designed according to the basic qualitative research method and consisted of 64 children between the ages of 4 and 5. The data were collected through interactive value…

The ability to distinguish between mere equality in resource distributions and fairness based on a broader range of contextual factors is of paramount importance in social decision making and is a critical component of morality. Children's developmental shift from viewing inequality as a dichotomous moral issue toward a more nuanced understanding…

Research on moral socialization has largely focused on the role of direct communication and has almost completely ignored a potentially rich source of social influence: evaluative comments that children overhear. We examined for the first time whether overheard comments can shape children's moral behavior. Three- and 5-year-old children (N = 200)…

Caregivers' moral reactions to young children's moral transgressions are informative environmental responses for children's developing understanding of morality. One central question concerns by which age parents hold their children responsible for moral transgressions. This study indirectly investigated this question by having parents and…

For millennia, adults have told children stories not only to entertain but also to impart important moral lessons to promote prosocial behaviors. Many such stories contain anthropomorphized animals because it is believed that children learn from anthropomorphic stories as effectively, if not better than, from stories with human characters, and…

Aggressive, violent, and disruptive behaviour among Belize youth is disproportionately high. The present study evaluated a school-based positive youth development program (Positive Action) using a clustered RCT. The aim of the study sought to examine post-treatment positive youth development competencies (i.e. social-emotional character…

While there is growing understanding about children's moral reasoning for social inclusion and exclusion, we know little about how children reason specifically about the inclusion of aggressive children in school settings. To investigate children's decisions about such inclusion and how they justified those decisions, this study reports data from…

Moral stories are a means of communicating the consequences of our actions and emphasizing virtuous behaviour, such as honesty. However, the effect of these stories on children's lie-telling has yet to be thoroughly explored. The current study investigated the influence of moral stories on children's willingness to lie for another individual.…

Background: The broad nature of young people's development is internationally acknowledged, which includes physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social elements. In England, schools have a legal obligation to promote spiritual, moral, social and cultural (SMSC) development. It has been suggested that personal, social, health and economic (PSHE)…

Previous research has found that when children engage in social and moral transgressions, they take steps to either remedy or explain their behavior. However, no prior systematic investigation has examined the strategies children employ to 'correct' their behavior in future situations. The present study employed a domain theory lens to investigate…