By Dr Margaret Lowenfeld
(Co-Director of the Institute of Child Psychology)

(Report of the third of four lectures in a course of eight on the “Common Difficulties in Normal Children” arranged by the Institute of Child Psychology and delivered at Friends’ House, Euston Road, N.W.1 on Wednesday, November 21^st, 1934.)

As you can imagine, the question of moral behaviour, taking those words in their widest possible sense, is one of the most frequent that comes up in the work I have to do. A very large proportion of children brought to one, either in private or otherwise, are children who from the point of view of those who bring them are not showing that conformity to moral standards that they should. These vary from quite serious delinquencies that come from the courts down to the milder troubles of non-conformity with the particular standards of the particular home in which the child lives. It is necessary very carefully to study in the way I tried to put before you last week with regard to obedience, what exactly are the requirements being made upon the child and what are the reasons for its failure and, indeed, of what nature is that failure, because one of the remarkable things about every kind of difficulty in connection with children, as I expect you are beginning to realize, is that they very rarely are what they seem to be.

The first point that strikes any one who has to deal with parents or teachers complaining of moral failure in children is the curious rigidity of the adult point of view. It is almost as if behaviour were a set of shaded cards or things that you take out of a box; that the child either had or had not jumped over this particular stile or gone through that hoop in the correct way. There seems to be little or no general understanding among the general public that a child’s capacity develops from stage to stage and is entirely different from one stage to another.