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ABSTRACT This article provides a social domain theory analysis of the role of parents in moral development. Social knowledge domains, including morality as distinct from other social concepts, are described. Then, it is proposed that, although morality is constructed from reciprocal social interactions, both affective and cognitive components of parents' interactions with their children may facilitate children's moral development. The affective context of the relationship may influence children's motivation to listen to and respond to parents; in addition, affect associated with responses to transgressions can affect children's encoding and remembering of those events. Although moral interactions occur frequently in peer contexts, parents ' domain-specific feedback about the nature of children's moral interactions are proposed to provide a cognitive mechanism for facilitating moral development. Parents promote children's moral understanding by providing domain appropriate and developmentally sensitive reasoning and explanations about the child's social world, which may stimulate the development of more mature moral thought. Various findings from the socialisation literature are presented and interpreted from within the social domain framework.
Although socialisation theorists have viewed moral internalisation as stemming primarily from parents' influence on children through their parenting practices, disciplinary strategies and parenting styles, structural-developmental theorists (Piaget, 1932/1965; Kohlberg, 1969; Damon, 1977; Colby & Kohlberg, 1987) generally have proposed that the hierarchical.nature of parent-child relationships constrains children's moral development. This has led to a predominant focus on the formative role of peers and social institutions such as schools in moral reasoning development and a relative neglect of the role of the family. In this article, parents' role in moral and social development is discussed from the perspective of social domain theory, an approach that is structural-developmental in origin but that departs in significant ways from previous theorising (for other reviews of this approach, see Turiel, 1983, 1998; Smetana, 1995a, 1997; Tisak, 1995; Nucci, 1996).
According to social domain theory, children construct different forms of social knowledge, including morality as well as other types of social knowledge, through their social experiences with adults (parents, teachers, other adults), peers and siblings. In keeping with the focus of this special issue, this article focuses primarily on moral development, but to understand social domain theory morality must be described in the context of, and as distinct from, other social-cognitive...