Author(s)

Jia Ou ^1,2

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Education Science, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210097, China
² School of Marxism, Xiangnan University, Chenzhou, 423000, China

Corresponding Author

Jia Ou

ABSTRACT

Children's moral education is closely intertwined with the advancement of social order and constitutes a central concern within the field of developmental psychology. In the Chinese context, the unique legacy of the one-child policy, combined with deeply rooted collectivist cultural traditions, has exerted a profound influence on children's moral development. Against the backdrop of the one-child policy, children-often colloquially labeled as "little emperors"-have had to navigate a complex social environment in which they construct and adapt their own moral frameworks. This raises a critical question worthy of systematic inquiry.In Raising Good Children: Morality and Child Development, Xu Jing provides an in-depth examination of the processes through which only children acquired moral understanding during early childhood, prior to the implementation of the "universal two-child" policy in China. The book focuses on the dual impact of the one-child policy and collectivist cultural norms on children's moral development. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2012 in a middle-class private kindergarten in Pudong, Shanghai, the study closely observed 120 children aged two to six. By integrating naturalistic ethnography with controlled experimental methods, the research foregrounds children's authentic voices and offers a nuanced analysis of moral development across three interrelated dimensions: moral cognition, moral emotion, and moral behavior. It further reveals the complex tensions between children and caregivers, as well as between children's cultural worlds and those of adults. The book not only demonstrates methodological interdisciplinarity but also makes a significant contribution to existing scholarship on children's moral education. From a dialectical and rational perspective, it calls for the cultivation of critical thinking and imaginative empathy in education, as essential means to mitigate and prevent latent moral risks.

KEYWORDS

Children; Raising Good Children; Moral education

CITE THIS PAPER

Jia Ou. The Moral "Umbilical Cord" of Human Infants-Reflections on Raising Good Children: Morality and Child Development. Advances in Educational Technology and Psychology (2026). Vol. 10, No. 1, 142-147. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/aetp.2026.100119.

REFERENCES

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[8] Cao, Yongguo. "Good Children: A Neglected Moral Concern." Journal of Soochow University (Educational Science Edition) 5, no. 1 (2017): 91–99.
[9] Xu, Jing. "Where Does Morality Come From? A Study on Children's Moral Development from the Perspective of Cognitive Anthropology." Sociological Review, no. 4 (2020): 3–19.
[10] Christensen, Pia, and Allison James. Research with Children: Perspectives and Practices. London: Falmer Press, 2000, 1–15.
[11] Xu, Jing. Raising Good Children: Morality and Child Development. Translated by Yuqing Zhu. Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2021, 1–8.

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