We tend to think of newborn babies or very young babies as a blank canvas and it is the job of parents and other people around them to teach them about the difference between good and bad, how to be kind and think of others.
There has been recent research to suggest that this is not the case. The building blocks of compassion, empathy and moral reasoning are actually in place from birth.
The researchers carried out a number of experiments to investigate these factors. They discovered that one year olds will come to the help of strangers who are struggling and that they are also able to have sophisticated reasoning of good and bad.
This article is really worth a read and it has the links embedded into it of clips of a number of the experiments that were carried out. Fascinating!
