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Summary Of I Listen To My Parents And I Wonder What They Believe By Robert Cole

Decent Essays

Learned Morality
Children ask countless questions as they mature. Children often turn to their parents for guidance. If a parent is unable or unwilling to answer these questions, a child, left to their own devices, will look for answers from their friends, the internet, and other authority figures. In his article “I Listen to My Parents and I Wonder What They Believe,” Robert Cole explains that children have an inborn desire to build their own morals by questioning authority figures around them, especially their parents. Therefore, A parent’s guidance influences a child’s morals as he/she develops.
As a toddler develops into a child, he/she becomes aware of what is right and wrong. A child desires to find out what morals are and why their parents make the decisions that they do. Coles articulates that “… any parent who has listened closely to his/her child knows that the girls and boys are capable of wandering about matters of morality…” (2003, p.439). Coles suggests that if a parent is willing to pay close attention to what his/her child asks, a parent will realize that children are indeed able to and need to ask those challenging moral …show more content…

Coles displays an example of moral questioning in his text. The mine owner’s daughter recalled that “My brother is only six and he asked Daddy awhile back who are the ‘just’ and ‘unjust,’…” (Coles, 2003, p.438) At only six years of age, the young boy is seeking for a deep and philosophical answer to a moral question. He ponders what morals a ‘just’ person has that an ‘unjust’ person lacks. Coles states that “Children need and long for words of moral advice, instruction, warning, as much as they need words of affirmation or criticism from their parents about other matters” (2003, p.441). Coles asserts that children develop an inborn desire to seek guidance from their parents on moral issues just as much as behavioral

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