Children and Morality

Children and Morality

Children listen and detect meaning in the words they hear. They try to make sense of the world they live in. They try to differentiate right from wrong. They naturally hunger to identify what the world expects of them in their judgments and actions. They are also struggling with the vast concepts of morality and grappling with the ethical impasses of life. Children, at an early age, are developing their concept of decency which is fundamental to their growth into fully developed self-actualized adults. These core tussles with defining virtuous action shapes the people they become. The following stories reveal the moral examination children undergo in reaction to the world and circumstances they experience.

In "No Name Woman", Maxine Hong Kingston's mother tells her the story of her aunt, the "No Name Woman", who is presumably raped while her husband is out of the country. She is accused and held accountable by her fellow villagers for her immorality. The aunt kills herself and her baby because of the disgrace she feels responsible for. They responded by attempting to erase her from existence, as if she had never been born. Kingston's mother shares this story as a cautionary tale to warn her daughter against the dangers of pre-marital sex. Her mother says "Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. The villagers are watchful" (46). She tells her daughter not to get pregnant out of wedlock and end up a "ghost" like her aunt.

The young Kingston has difficulty making sense of her mother's story and fails to receive direct responses to her questions and concerns. Her struggle to understand how knowing the history of her aunt who committed suicide will help her conduct herself properly is reflected in the questions she asks directly to Chinese Americans: "Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?" (Kingston 47) "But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have." Here, the short sentence "And I have" emphasizes the guilt Kingston still feels for having neglected No Name Woman's memory for as long as she has. Having told a family secret, she fears recrimination from her parents and, ironically, worries that her aunt haunts her because she is displeased that Kingston has revealed her story.

Robert Coles shows the same internal fight in youngsters. The author had a lot of conversations with children under circumstances of extreme stress and found a common thread among them. "In many instances I was off the mark. These children weren't "patient"; they weren't even complaining. They were worried, all right and often enough they had things to say that were substantive-they had to do not so much with troubled emotions as with questions of right and wrong in the real life dramas taking place in their worlds."(Cole 46) His essay contains interviews with children in the south in 1963 who are in the middle of the desegregation clashes brought on by the "Separate but Equal" legislation being overturned. One young girl makes a poignant statement showing her inner struggle. "But sometimes you're not sure if you're on the right track" (59). This child is aware of right and wrong, the importance of how you treat your fellow human beings, and that the adults