Robert Coles

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Making Morality a Part of Growing Up

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SOURCE: "Making Morality a Part of Growing Up," in New York Times Book Review, January 27, 1997, pp. 88-9.

[In the following review, Bernstein takes account of the qualities and failings of The Moral Intelligence of Children.]

Robert Coles, whose voluminous writings and positions as professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School have made his name synonymous with wisdom about children, promises to render an important service in this latest of his many books. The dust jacket phrase puts it simply: "How to raise a moral child." And Dr. Coles asserts early on that his new book deals with "how we as adults, as mothers and fathers and schoolteachers and friends, give shape to the values of children as expressed in their behavior, their conduct; how we encourage them and instruct them to uphold in daily life one or another set of beliefs."

Dr. Coles no doubt has a wealth of experience and knowledge to draw on as he sets about his task in The Moral Intelligence of Children, which is a sequel to highly acclaimed works of his like The Moral Life of Children and The Spiritual Life of Children. He tells many stories of encounters with young patients and their anxious parents, some of them moving and revealing and most of them illustrating Dr. Coles's main conclusion: even when children seem most in rebellion, most withdrawn, most stubbornly uncooperative, they "very much need a sense of purpose and direction in life, a set of values grounded in moral introspection—a spiritual life that is given sanction by their parents and others in the adult world."

There is, in short, wisdom in Dr. Coles's new book. But The Moral Intelligence of Children is weakened by nebulousness, wordiness, by Dr. Coles's tendency to circle the issue so that he raises interesting questions but then answers them with not much more than earnest truisms: be smart, be sympathetic, avoid the extremes of setting a bad moral example yourself or being so tyrannically moralistic that you squeeze the joy out of life: "Priggish, finger-pointing children (or adults) are, alas, not rare."

This advice is fine as far as it goes, but that is not very far. If you are looking for insight into the nature and origins of morality in children, or the dark side that propels some young people to be cruel or sadistic, or even what you should do if your teen-age daughter defies your moral stand and insists on having a sex life and taking drugs, this book will only partly satisfy you.

Dr. Coles begins with the concept of moral intelligence, the faculty, separate from the qualities that make one a good mathematician or lawyer, of being what he calls "a good person," somebody with "character," of being "smart" in the way one deals with others. He brings up some experiences with children: a bright little girl who cheats in class; a group of privileged, smug, ultracool teen-agers experimenting with drugs and maintaining an attitude of general disdain for their semi-absent parents; a 14-year-old girl named Delia who is pregnant and lost. "What ought to be done?" Dr. Coles then asks, and one wonders with him, what indeed?

Dr. Coles makes the important statement that "absent parents, detached parents, haunt these narratives," but he never answers his own question. Dr. Coles's central subject is, as he puts it, "the moral archeology of childhood," in which he covers the stages of moral development, from earliest infancy to adolescence, recounting therapy sessions with parents, encounters with children, discussions with his former teacher Anna Freud (toward whom his attitude is worshipful).

There are interesting and valuable passages here, especially ones that illuminate children's powerful orientation toward the creation of a moral universe for themselves, and their quickness in seeing through the usual psychologists' palaver about such things. "You can't take a breath if you're a teen-ager without someone coming at you and telling you that you're going through this 'cycle,' and you should 'share your feelings,'" one clever young women tells him.

But the problem even with these passages is that the tone is more homiletic than analytical, more earnest than shrewd. There are lengthy passages that while certainly true, do little more than evoke how interesting and wonderful the growth of a child is. "These are years of magic," Dr. Coles writes of the time when children are of the age to go to school," of the imagination stirred and fed in innumerable ways, of all that goes with a mind encouraged to explore the world, to try to make sense of it."

Dr. Coles is certainly an insightful and sensitive man, and reading his accounts of his sessions with patients, you feel you would turn to him if a child of yours needed psychiatric help. At the same time he does a great deal of talking about himself in this book, rebuking himself for his "preconceptions and blind spots and prejudices," expressing appreciation for the lifelong lessons he is always learning from the children he meets and generally striking a tone of such strenuous modesty and self-effacement that one suspects it is a form of egoism.

His concluding section, entitled "Letter to Parents and Teachers," is especially disappointing, a pastoral essay supposedly on the subject of uniting moral principles with actual behavior, but that is rambling, discursive and unfocused. Dr. Coles talks about some children's reactions to a moral parable by Tolstoy; he remembers the way his parents tried to instill an ethical sense in him; he reflects on Ralph Waldo Emerson's remark that "Character is higher than intellect," and ends on Henry James's admonition to his nephew to above all be kind.

Nothing is objectionable here certainly. But like so much in this book, the high-mindedness of it all seems both self-serving and abstract. When you turn the final page, you feel that you have spent a couple of hundred pages with a decent, intelligent man, but you are not so sure exactly what you have learned that you didn't know before.

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