Early childhood education plays an important role in children's moral development. The objective of this study is to examine whether the strategies proposed by early childhood teachers to resolve their children's conflicts encourages the development of children's heteronomy or moral autonomy. Ten teachers, aged from 21 to 41, participated in this study. The instruments that were used included: (a) a questionnaire about the teachers' training and their work and (b) a semi-structured interview, in which we present two situations featuring conflict among children. The participants' responses were content-analysed. The teachers proposed both strategies likely to lead to the development of moral heteronomy and strategies likely to lead to the development of moral autonomy, although the latter were less frequent. We discuss the relevance of these data for the moral education of young children and the contribution of this study for improving early education teachers' training.
Moral development; conflict; early childhood education