Moral self-concept in kindergarten predicts better social skills in early school years, study finds

Children’s views of themselves as moral individuals can boost their social and emotional skills — and vice versa — according to a longitudinal study published in Cognition & Emotion.

Socioemotional competencies, such as emotion regulation, empathy, and prosocial behavior, are essential for children’s successful social functioning and psychological development. These skills are shaped by early experiences and social interactions, and they become especially important during key life transitions, like entering primary school.

A related but distinct construct, moral self-concept (MSC), refers to how children view themselves in terms of moral traits and actions. Past research shows that a strong MSC is associated with increased prosocial behavior and emotion regulation. However, less is known about how MSC and socioemotional competencies influence each other over time, particularly during the transition from kindergarten to primary school.

Tina Schiele and colleagues explored this connection by investigating the development and relationship of socioemotional competencies and MSC in early childhood. Theoretical accounts differ: one view posits that MSC emerges from observing one’s own prosocial behaviors (the self-perception approach), while another suggests that MSC, formed through early socialization, leads to later socioemotional competencies (the self-consistency approach). This study was designed to test both models using a longitudinal dataset.

The researchers tracked 500 children (~5-years-old) from southern Germany across two years, beginning in the penultimate year of kindergarten and ending at the close of Grade 1. These children were drawn from over 300 kindergartens and later enrolled in more than 200 primary schools, ensuring broad representativeness. Data collection occurred at four key points, capturing both children’s self-perceptions and teacher-rated behavior. The cohort was split into two groups: one began data collection about eight months earlier than the other, allowing for staggered tracking of development.

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Children’s moral self-concept was assessed using picture-based self-report measures tailored to their age. Initially, children responded to images of peers engaging in moral or antisocial behaviors and indicated how much they resembled the child in the picture. As the children aged and entered primary school, this was replaced with a more detailed Likert-style scale allowing them to express moral tendencies (like sharing or helping) on a continuum.

Teachers, meanwhile, evaluated the children’s socioemotional competencies, such as emotion regulation, empathy, and prosocial behavior, through well-validated behavioral checklists appropriate to the child’s developmental stage. Instruments evolved over time, switching from observation tools commonly used in kindergarten to rating scales suited for school settings. To contextualize children’s social environment, the researchers also gathered data on family socioeconomic status, including income, parental education, and occupational prestige.

The researchers found that moral self-concept and socioemotional competencies demonstrated considerable stability across the two-year period, even as children transitioned from kindergarten into the more structured environment of primary school. Children who rated themselves as more moral at earlier time points tended to maintain that view over time, and the same was true for teacher ratings of socioemotional competencies. These trajectories did not appear to be random or situationally bound, but rather suggested relatively consistent developmental patterns.

Interestingly, while the two constructs were only weakly linked in kindergarten, a meaningful correlation emerged after children entered school. Specifically, moral self-concept and socioemotional competencies began to align more closely in Grade 1, suggesting that children’s self-perception as “good” or “moral” became increasingly reflected in their socially competent behaviors, or vice versa.

When examining predictive relationships, the findings supported a bidirectional model. A strong moral self-concept in the final year of kindergarten predicted greater socioemotional competence in the early months of Grade 1. In turn, children who displayed stronger socioemotional skills in Grade 1 were more likely to report a heightened moral self-concept by the end of that school year. This reciprocal pattern supports the idea that early moral identity and emotional-social abilities reinforce each other across time.

Girls consistently received higher socioemotional competence ratings from teachers and reported higher MSC at certain time points, though these differences were not uniform. Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds occasionally reported higher moral self-concepts than their higher-socioeconomic peers, though they were rated less favorably on socioemotional competencies by teachers. These effects, however, were not consistently observed across all time points and should be interpreted cautiously.

Overall, the findings underscore a developmental synergy between children’s sense of themselves as moral beings and their social-emotional skill set, especially during the sensitive school transition period.

This research faced a high proportion of missing teacher data (around 46%), which may limit the precision of the findings despite the use of robust imputation techniques.

The study, “Good child, bad child: the development of and relations between children’s socioemotional competencies and moral self-concept from kindergarten to the end of Grade 1” was authored by Tina Schiele, Anna Mues, María Valcárcel Jiménez, and Frank Niklas.