Parent-child conversations and the socialization of moral autonomy in a progressive Protestant church community

Abstract

ABSTRACT Much of the previous work on culture and moral reasoning development has focused on the cultural content of moral reasoning, demonstrating how moral autonomy, which emphasizes justice and individual welfare, is culturally structured. This paper investigates cultural processes of autonomous moral reasoning development by analyzing parent-child conversations. To do so, this paper first offers a conceptual analysis that reinterprets previous findings regarding parent-child conversations and moral autonomy through a cultural lens. To illustrate these conceptual claims, it then provides empirical qualitative analyses of parent-child conversations among members of a progressive Protestant church community. Substantively, results identified multiple conversational processes that redundantly enacted autonomy, yet also suggested the limits of parent-child conversations as a context for children’s moral autonomy development in this community. Broadly, this paper highlights the ways in which cultural moral outlooks are implicitly, and selectively, socialized through particular conversational processes, and the active nature of cultural reproduction.