The child’s history of early stance toward parental socialization as a context for emerging moral self: A cascade from infancy to toddlerhood to preschool age

As interest in early morality has grown, researchers have increasingly focused on young children’s moral self, but recent studies have targeted mostly its structure and associations with behavior rather than its developmental origins. Addressing this gap, we followed children, mothers, and fathers in US Midwest from late infancy (16 months old, N = 194, 93 girls, 101 boys), to toddlerhood (3 years old, N = 175, 86 girls, 89 boys), to preschool age (4.5 years old, N = 177, 86 girls, 91 boys). We proposed that moral self at preschool age originates in the second and third years, when the onset of parental control engenders in the child both receptive and adversarial stance toward the parent. In infancy and in toddlerhood, we collected behavioral indications of both stances – positive affect and responsiveness (in toddlerhood, also positive representation of the parent); and defiance and violations of parental prohibition. At preschool age, we measured child moral self in a puppet interview (Kochanska, 2002). For both mother- and father-child relationships, structural equation modeling supported direct paths from receptive and adversarial stance at age 3 years to higher and lower moral self, respectively, and the expected indirect effects of the child’s receptive stance in infancy on moral self, mediated by the receptive or adversarial stance in toddlerhood. The path from toddler-age adversarial stance to lower moral self was present only in father-son relationships. This study highlights the long-term pivotal significance of the child’s early stance toward the parent for the formation of moral self.