Moral Formation in the Family

Several lessons are drawn for future research on parenting and moral formation on the basis of an historical perspective on the moral development research program. One is that sociomoral formation is a special case of personality development that draws attention to the role of attachment, event representations, autobiographical memory, and temperament for organizing dispositional coherence around morality. A second is that research on moral development in the family will be increasingly informed by study of the moral self of infancy and on the importance of early life rearing experience, widely discussed in disparate literatures from object relations to epigenetics. A third line of research might focus on parenting characteristics “beyond parenting style” to include parents’ ideological and faith commitments, their mindsets with respect to children’s personality and capacity for change, and their own sense of generativity.