Will my kid choose to do the right thing and recycle?

By: Catherine Blanchard

Olimpia Zagnoli

When it comes to adolescents, we can often worry about the decisions they are making. Their autonomy is developing in new and exciting ways, but this brings risk and uncertainty for those responsible for the adolescent. One of the biggest worries for parents is whether or not their child will make morally upright decisions. Lucky for us, Tobias Krettenauer at Wilfred Laurier University researched how adolescents’ morality develops in the context of environmental decisions (2017). By looking at and understanding his findings, we can better understand how adolescents approach these specific decisions, apply these findings to other moral decisions adolescents have to make, and thus take some of the mystery out of the mysterious moral musings of minors.

            So, why exactly was Krettenauer trying to research the moral development of adolescents surrounding the environment? For starters, there wasn’t much research about it to begin with! Previously people had studied how adolescents generally approached the topic of environmental concerns, but there wasn’t much information about the differences that occurred as adolescents developed their moral decision-making abilities (2017). Knowing this, Krettenauer got his crew together and preformed a cross-sectional study which gathered 325 Canadian adolescents who ranged from early adolescents to late adolescents and asked them a series of environmental questions. These questions were aimed at having the adolescent engage in imaginative scenarios, some involving their own family and others involving a hypothetical family, and then express their feelings towards these scenarios (2017). With these questions, Krettenauer and his crew were measuring their emotional responses to the scenarios, their moral judgements concerning them, their overall appreciation for nature, and the active steps they would take in engaging in behavior that would benefit the environment (2017). What is interesting about their measurements is that they captured, not only the adolescents’ thoughts and feelings about engaging in pro-environmental behavior, but also their willingness and likelihood to put their money where their mouth is and engage in these behaviors. Now, Krettenauer found that as adolescents aged, they were more likely to fall off the environmental band-wagon. The reason why, ironically enough, was because they saw it as a band-wagon or, in other words, just a social convention that wasn’t actually obligatory. Another reason, Krettenauer found, that caused this dip off in late adolescents was a decrease in appreciation for nature (2017). All that being said, Krettenauer’s research with Canadian adolescents and their feelings towards the environment can tell us a lot about the moral developments of adolescents in general.

            I’ll circle back around to that daunting question all parents ask themselves: Will my child do the right thing? If you’re looking at Krettenauer’s results and feeling hopeless, don’t be! If the reason the adolescents break moral obligations is that they only see them as social conventions, then the solution is written in the problem. As a parent, you can help your adolescent understand that some things aren’t merely social conventions. So, fear not and have hope that they’ll make good decisions!

References

Krettenauer, T. (2017). Pro-environmental behavior and adolescent moral development. Journal of Research on Adolescence (Wiley-Blackwell), 27(3), 581–593. doi: 10.1111/jora.12300

Zagnoli O. (Photographer). (2015, Feb 27). n.d. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/opinion/sunday/is-the-environment-a-moral-cause.html