Robert Coles - The Moral Life of Children

THE MORAL LIFE OF CHILDREN

CHILDREN OF CRISIS: A Study of Courage and Fear
DEAD END SCHOOL
STILL HUNGRY IN AMERICA
THE GRASS PIPE
THE IMAGE IS YOU
WAGES OF NEGLECT
UPROOTED CHILD FARMERS
TEACHERS AND THE CHILDREN OF POVERTY
DRUGS AND YOUTH: Medical, Psychiatric and Legal Facts
ERIK H. ERIKSON: The Growth of His Work
THE MIDDLE AMERICANS
THE GEOGRAPHY OF FAITH: Conversations Between Daniel Berrigan, When Underground, and Robert Coles
MIGRANTS, SHARECROPPERS AND MOUNTAINEERS (Volume II of Children of Crisis)
THE SOUTH GOES NORTH (Volume III of Children of Crisis)
SAVING FACE
FAREWELL TO THE SOUTH
TWELVE TO SIXTEEN: Early Adolescence (with Jerome Kagan)
A SPECTACLE UNTO THE WORLD
RIDING FREE
THE OLD ONES OF NEW MEXICO
THE STUDENTS THEMSELVES
THE DARKNESS AND THE LIGHT
THE BUSES ROLL
IRONY IN THE MINDS LIFE: Essays on Novels by James Agee, Elizabeth Bowen, and George Eliot
HEADSPARKS
WILLAIM CARLOS WILLIAMS: The Knack of Survival in America
THE MINDS FATE
ESKIMOS, CHICANOS, INDIANS (Volume IV of Children of Crisis)
PRIVILEGED ONES: The Well-Off and the Rich in America
A FESTERING SWEETNESS
WOMEN OF CRISIS: Lives of Struggle and Hope (with Jane Hallowell Coles)
THE LAST AND FIRST ESKIMOS
WALKER PERCY: An American Search
FLANNERY OCONNORS SOUTH
WOMEN OF CRISIS, Volume II: Lives of Work and Dreams (with Jane Hallowell Coles)
I WILL ALWAYS STAY ME: Writings of Migrant Children (co-edited with Sherry Kafka)
DOROTHEA LANGE: Photographs of Lifetime
THE DOCTOR STORIES OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (ed.)
AGEE (with Ross Spears)
SEX AND THE AMERICAN TEENAGER
THE POLITICAL LIFE OF CHILDREN
IN THE STREET (with Helen Levitt)
DOROTHY DAY: A Radical Devotion
SIMONE WEIL: A Modern Pilgrimage
TIME OF SURRENDER: Selected Essays
HARVARD DIARY
THAT RED WHEELBARROW: Selected Literary Essays
THE CALL OF STORIES: Teaching and the Moral Imagination
RUMORS OF SEPARATE WORLDS
THE CHILD IN OUR TIMES: Studies in the Development of Resiliency (co-edited with Timothy Dugan)
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF CHILDREN
BREAKING THE CYCLE: Survivors of Child Abuse and Neglect (with Pamela Fong)
ANNA FREUD: The Dream of Psychoanalysis
THEIR EYES MEETING THE WORLD
COLLECTED ESSAYS
THE CALL OF SERVICE: A Witness to Idealism
THE STORY OF RUBY BRIDGES
HARVARD DIARY II: Essays on the Sacred and the Secular
THE MORAL INTELLIGENCE OF CHILDREN
THE YOUNGEST PARENTS (with John Moses and Jocelyn Lee)
DOING DOCUMENTARY WORK
OLD AND ON THEIR OWN
SCHOOL (with Nicholas Nixon)
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER (Modern Spiritual Masters Series)
THE SECULAR MIND

Robert Coles

Copyright 1986 by Robert Coles

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc.,
841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

FIRST ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION

Chapter 1, Psychoanalysis and Moral Development, appeared, in a different form, in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Summer 1981. Parts of Chapter IV, On Character, appeared, in a different form, in Daedalus, Fall 1981. Parts of Chapter VII, Children and the Nuclear Bomb, appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coles, Robert.
The moral life of children.

Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Moral development. I. Title.
BF723.M54C65 1986 155.48 85-18590
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9658-3

Atlantic Monthly Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

To the memory of Anna Freud
To the memory of William Carlos Williams
To Jane, with continuing thanks

THE MORAL LIFE OF CHILDREN

IF my wife had had her way, back in 1960, when our work in the South with black and white children was just starting, the subject matter of this book would have been our major preoccupation all along. She is a high school teacher (English and history), and she has always been interested in the moral side of her students lives: their ideals and values; their sense of what is right and wrong, and how they state their reasons; and not least, the moral statements they make in response to what she teaches. In New Orleans, twenty-five years ago, when we were talking with young black children passing through segregationist mobs to enter school, and white children also harassed even for attending a school with a black child in it, my wife was quick to hear those children ask the old existentialist questions (Why? Why me? Why such behavior from fellow human beings?). She was also ready and eager to respond to that inquiring initiative on the part of particular boys and girls to hear them out, to answer the questions put to us, to share her own ideas, thoughts, worries, and hopes.

I have to say that such was not my inclination. As I indicated in the five volumes of Children of Crisis, wherein I tried to describe the work I have done in various parts of this country, among various kinds of children, my training in child psychiatry has not always helped me comprehend the ways in which those children have managed. When they have been fearful, anxious, frightened, sad, The subject begs research, more and more of it.

When my wife and I worked with SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and lived in Louisiana and Georgia, during the civil rights days of the 1960s, I began to figure out one way of doing my work. Even though I was not treating children, as I had done in Bostons Childrens Hospital, and even though these southern children werent complaining of nightmares or appetite loss or constraining phobias (three somewhat common psychiatric ills of children), the boys and girls were experiencing moments of crisis, were confronting threats, outright violence, were trying to survive psychologically as well as physically. And so I tried to work toward a version of documentary child psychiatry: to record how a historical crisis (school integration) or a social and economic crisis (the trials of Appalachias mountain families and of migrant farm families), or a long-standing racial impasse (the conditions of Indians in, say, the Southwest, or of Eskimos in coastal Alaska) bears upon the mental life of young people.

I tried to uncover a psychology of everyday life; a psychology of turmoil and response to turmoil; a psychology of hope against hope with plenty of interludes of doubt and fear. It turned out to be a psychology not characterized by an overwhelming weight of symptomatology. Yes, I have seen a number of children in the rural or urban South or in our northern ghettos, our working-class suburbs or affluent ones who might have been helped by visits to a