Parent Discipline and the Child's Consideration for Others12

Most research on the parental antecedents of moral development has been inspired by psychoanalytic theory, which stresses the importance of repression in the internalization of moral standards. It is perhaps for this reason that the research has focused mainly on prohibitions (e.g., cheating, aggression, disobedience, lying), and the aspects of prohibitions studied have usually been resistance to temptation (I, 4, 5, 13, I6) and guilt reactions following transgression (1, 3, 6, 15). The findings in these studies have been reviewed in detail elsewhere (io). The present paper takes a different point of departure and deals with the antecedents of a positive norm: consideration for others.