1.1 Explain The Importance Of Moral And Cultural Differences In Children

The definition of morality is principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour.

Young children do not have normally have a belief system and take their position from their parents/carers. Children learn what is right and wrong from the carers around them and the reactions they get from their parents/carers towards their actions. For example, a child how breaks their toys will be told off by their parent and will know that their actions were wrong.

Morality is not genetic and as a child grows, they will begin to understand what is right and wrong by the reaction of adults around them. Infants are egocentric and their sense of right and wrong develops from their own feelings and needs.

Toddlers still don’t

In my placement at the private nursery, there are identical twins of around 2 years – they have just began to see that they are separate people by recognising that they have different names and are different people. When they first commenced at nursery they didn’t recognise themselves as separate children.

Evidence of increased self awareness is the change in a child’s language to using ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’.

As part of self-awareness, a child’s sex concept begins to develop between 2 and 5 years. Toddlers begin to play with gender stereotyped toys, such as dolls and cars, etc. From the around 2 years of age children can recognise pictures of same-sex children. They also begin to see differences between genders, such as length of hair; clothing and physical differences. From about 3 years children begin to link different jobs, objects and tasks with different genders, such as mummy’s cook and daddy’s work on the car or mummy’s handbag or daddy’s hammer. From around 5 years children begin to understand that both sexes can wear trousers or do the same jobs (police officer or fire fighter),