By: Catherine Blanchard
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
