The Moral Life of Children
The Moral Life of Children

Author: Robert Coles

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 0802196586

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An in-depth investigation from the renowned child psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author: “Fascinating.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review In this searching, vivid inquiry, Robert Coles shows how children struggle with questions of moral choice. Bringing to life the voices of children from a rich diversity of backgrounds, including regions plagued by poverty or social unrest, he explores their reactions to movies and stories, their moral conduct, their conversations and relationships with friends and family, and their anxieties about themselves and the fate of the world. Whether they are from the poorest classes of Rio de Janeiro or middle-class America, these children lead lives of intense moral awareness. “What meaning do terms like ‘conscience’ or ‘moral purpose’ hold for malnourished, sick, poorly clothed children in Brazilian slums or South African hovels, children whose main goal is to survive another day? In attempting to answer this question, child psychiatrist Coles shows how children in the most trying circumstances manage to maintain their moral dignity.”—Publishers Weekly

The Political Life of Children
The Political Life of Children

Author: Robert Coles

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780871137715

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Robert Coles, one of the most eminent child psychiatrists in the world, spent over a decade researching this book and its companion volume, The Moral Life of Children. Coles visits children all over the world, listening with willing ears, and he captures their thoughts and feelings with remarkable sympathy. As Coles demonstrates in this fascinating work, children learn much more than we think they do about political issues. While we have always taken it for granted that parents teach their children about language, religion, and morality, Coles shows how mothers and fathers also instill a strong understanding of political life in their offspring.

Moral Child
Moral Child

Author: William Damon

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2008-06-30

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1439105391

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William Damon offers the first, much-needed overview of the evolution and nurturance of children's moral understanding and behavior from infancy through adolescence, at home and in school. Drawing on the best professional research and thinking, Professor William Damon charts pragmatic, workable approaches to foster basic virtues such as honesty, responsibility, kindness, and fairness—methods that can make an invaluable difference throughout children's lives.

The Moral Project of Childhood
The Moral Project of Childhood

Author: Daniel Thomas Cook

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2020-02-18

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1479810266

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Examines the Protestant origins of motherhood and the child consumer Throughout history, the responsibility for children’s moral well-being has fallen into the laps of mothers. In The Moral Project of Childhood, the noted childhood studies scholar Daniel Thomas Cook illustrates how mothers in the nineteenth-century United States meticulously managed their children’s needs and wants, pleasures and pains, through the material world so as to produce the “child” as a moral project. Drawing on a century of religiously-oriented child care advice in women’s periodicals, he examines how children ultimately came to be understood by mothers—and later, by commercial actors—as consumers. From concerns about taste, to forms of discipline and punishment, to play and toys, Cook delves into the social politics of motherhood, historical anxieties about childhood, and early children’s consumer culture. An engaging read, The Moral Project of Childhood provides a rich cultural history of childhood.

The Spiritual Life of Children
The Spiritual Life of Children

Author: Robert Coles

Publisher: HMH

Published: 1991-10-10

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0547524641

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A look at faith through the voices of children from varied religious backgrounds, by the Pulitzer-winning author of The Moral Intelligence of Children. A New York Times Notable Book What do children think about when they consider God, Heaven and Hell, the value of life in the here and now, and the inevitability of death? Child psychiatrist, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, and Harvard professor Robert Coles spent thirty years interviewing hundreds of children—from South America and Europe to Africa and the Middle East—who are developing concepts of faith even as they struggle to understand its contradictions. Be they Catholic or Protestant, Jewish children from Boston, Pakistani children in London, agnostics, Native Americans, or young Christians in the American South, they offer honest, enlightening and sometimes startling ideas of a spiritual existence. A Hopi girl who knows for a fact that we are resurrected as birds; an African American child who believes God exists as a hurricane to “blow away” drug dealers; a young Christian who needs his faith to cope with the death of his sister, lest she be just “a big heartache to us till the day we die”; and a Tennessee child who rationalizes his belief by admitting that “if there's no God, that's all there is, ashes.” The Spiritual Life of Children is “a remarkable book. The generosity of vision that characterizes Dr. Coles's enterprise enables him to create a climate where words of great beauty and truthfulness can be spoken.” —The New York Times

The Moral Life of Schools
The Moral Life of Schools

Author: Philip W. Jackson

Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Published: 1998-03-16

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780787940669

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"Rarely have I come across a book that so quickly provoked me to re-examine my own classroom behavior. There is no place to hide in this careful scrutiny of the teacher as crucial player in the daily morality tale that becomes the story of school life." -- Vivian Gussin Paley, teacher, University of Chicago Laboratory Schools This book takes the reader on an eye-opening journey through a variety of elementary and high school classrooms, highlighting the moral significance of all that transpires there. Drawing on the results of a two-and-a-half year study, the authors examine the ways in which moral considerations permeate the everyday life of classrooms. In addition to providing teachers and teacher educators with a new framework for looking at and thinking about the moral dimensions of schooling, the authors also offer specific suggestions about how to look at classroom events from a moral perspective. Contents One. Looking for the Moral: An Observer's Guide Two. Becoming Aware of Moral Complexity Within a School Setting: Four Sets of Observations Three. Facing Moral Ambiguity and Tension: Four More Sets of Observations Four. Cultivating Expressive Awareness in Schools and Classrooms Postscript: Where Might One Go from Here? Philip W. Jackson is the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor of Education and Psychology and a member of the Committee on Ideas and Methods at the University of Chicago. Robert E. Boostrom is a senior research associate of the Benton Center for Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Chicago. David T. Hansen is an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago

Bringing Up a Moral Child
Bringing Up a Moral Child

Author: Michael Schulman

Publisher: Main Street Books

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13:

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Many of today's parents struggle to raise their children without the help of an extended family or religious training. They want to give their children a strong sense of moral values, but they don't know how. The revised and updated edition of Bringing Up a Moral Child is the perfect book for parents who are concerned about their children's moral development.

Why Have Children?
Why Have Children?

Author: Christine Overall

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012-02-03

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0262300516

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A wide-ranging exploration of whether or not choosing to procreate can be morally justified—and if so, how. In contemporary Western society, people are more often called upon to justify the choice not to have children than they are to supply reasons for having them. In this book, Christine Overall maintains that the burden of proof should be reversed: that the choice to have children calls for more careful justification and reasoning than the choice not to. Arguing that the choice to have children is not just a prudential or pragmatic decision but one with ethical repercussions, Overall offers a wide-ranging exploration of how we might think systematically and deeply about this fundamental aspect of human life. Writing from a feminist perspective, she also acknowledges the inevitably gendered nature of the decision; the choice has different meanings, implications, and risks for women than it has for men. After considering a series of ethical approaches to procreation, and finding them inadequate or incomplete, Overall offers instead a novel argument. Exploring the nature of the biological parent-child relationship—which is not only genetic but also psychological, physical, intellectual, and moral—she argues that the formation of that relationship is the best possible reason for choosing to have a child.

Moral Status and Human Life
Moral Status and Human Life

Author: James G. Dwyer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-10-21

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139493183

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Are children of equal, lesser, or perhaps even greater moral importance than adults? This work of applied moral philosophy develops a comprehensive account of how adults as moral agents ascribe moral status to beings - ourselves and others - and on the basis of that account identifies multiple criteria for having moral status. It argues that proper application of those criteria should lead us to treat children as of greater moral importance than adults. This conclusion presents a basis for critiquing existing social practices, many of which implicitly presuppose that children occupy an inferior status, and for suggesting how government policy, law, and social life might be different if it reflected an assumption that children are actually of superior status.

The Worth of a Child
The Worth of a Child

Author: Thomas H. Murray

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-09-01

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0520915305

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Thomas Murray's graceful and humane book illuminates one of the most morally complex areas of everyday life: the relationship between parents and children. What do children mean to their parents, and how far do parental obligations go? What, from the beginning of life to its end, is the worth of a child? Ethicist Murray leaves the rarefied air of abstract moral philosophy in order to reflect on the moral perplexities of ordinary life and ordinary people. Observing that abstract moral terms such as altruism and selfishness can be buried in the everyday doings of families, he maintains that ethical theory needs a richer description than it now has of the moral life of parents and children. How far should adults go in their quest for children? What options are available to women who do not want to bear a child now? Should couples be allowed to reject a child because of genetic disability or "wrong" gender? How can we weigh the competing claims of the genetic and the rearing parents to a particular child? The Worth of a Child couples impressive learning with a conversational style. Only by getting down to cases, Murray insists, can we reach moral conclusions that are unsentimental, farsighted, and just. In an era of intense public and private acrimony about the place and meaning of "family values," his practical wisdom about extraordinary difficult moral issues offers compelling reading for both experienced and prospective parents, as well as for ethicists, social and behavioral scientists, and legal theorists.