They think that rules cannot be changed, and have always been the same as they are now. Heteronomous children believe that all behaviour will be judged by it's consequences, regardless of the intentions or reasons for that behaviour. Between seven and ten years of age, children start to learn that rules can be changed by agreement , or by trial and error. Children begin to realise that if they behave in ways that appear to be wrong, but have good intentions, they are not necessarily going to be punished. A child who can decentre can take other intentions and circumstances into account when making moral judgements.
As children gain more experience, they should acquire the rules of logic. Piaget calls this the formal-operational thought. Children's thinking changes o become more philosophical. They talk about what should happen, and what shouldn't be allowed. They realise that there are often many sides to an argument and things aren't always quite as clear and simple as they seem. When judging their own and other people's behaviour, they may take several factors into account. Children should be becoming able to control their own reasoning and behaviour. Piaget calls this the stage of autonomous morality (or moral independence).
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Piaget's methods and the theories he developed are still regarded as a revolutionary step forward in our understanding of how children think. Many researchers have repeated Piaget's studies and attempted to refine and improve his methods. They have shown that children's moral reasoning does change as they grow up, and distinct stages of development may well exist. However, Piaget's methods have been criticised for being rather over-complicated and difficult for children to understand. If children gave constant answers to questions, perhaps they are not saying what they really know, but rather they might not understand the questions. Also, his experiments were conducted by watching and questioning his own children, which he then generalised to the rest of the population.