How a Child Judges Your Punishment: What Severity Signals About Character

The hidden message in how hard you come down

A child watches an adult punish another child. The wrongdoing is the same in every scenario; only the penalty changes — from nothing, to mild correction, to something harsh. What does the watching child conclude about the adult?

Young-Ah Lee and Lara H. Solomon's 2025 study in Developmental Psychology answers that question with notable precision. Children across the preschool and early elementary years made distinct moral evaluations of punishers based on punishment severity alone. Mild punishment signaled fairness and good character. Harsh punishment signaled something worrying — even when the target of the punishment had done something genuinely wrong. The absence of any punishment read, in most conditions, as a moral failure of a different kind: indifference or partiality.

The takeaway is not that children want a consequence-free world. It is that they are already — by age four or five — reading adult behavior for what it reveals about the adult's inner life. Punishment is not neutral information. It is character disclosure.

What children are actually measuring

The study used a common developmental method: vignettes in which one character distributed resources unequally, and a second character responded with punishment at varying intensities. Children rated the punisher's moral character and their desire to affiliate with that person.

Several results are worth holding closely.

First, children did not simply prefer less punishment. Their judgments tracked proportionality. A punisher who did nothing when something genuinely wrong occurred was rated poorly — as someone who tolerated injustice. A punisher who responded mildly was rated most favorably. A punisher who went harsh was rated poorly again, but for the opposite reason: excess, not leniency.

Second, these effects appeared across age groups, with even younger children showing sensitivity to the distinction. The capacity to read severity as a signal of character is not a late cognitive achievement; it is present early.

Third, affiliation mattered: children were less willing to interact with harsh punishers, not just less admiring of them. The social consequence is real, not merely abstract.

This is developmental psychology arriving at something that moral philosophy has long argued: proportionality in punishment is not a bureaucratic rule but an expression of justice as a virtue. Thomas Aquinas, treating justice in the Summa Theologiae II-II, understood that a just act must correspond to what is actually owed — neither more nor less. A penalty in excess of the offense is not severity tempered by justice; it is a new injustice laid on top of the first one.

The adult character that children need to see

The CCMMP framework, developed by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, understands the human person as created for relationship and ordered toward flourishing through the cardinal virtues — prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance — operating in their proper integration. Formation in virtue is not primarily didactic; it is participatory. Children learn virtue by witnessing and being apprenticed into virtuous action.

Lee and Solomon's findings map directly onto this. When an adult punishes proportionately, they are not simply applying a correct rule; they are performing justice in front of a watching child. That performance becomes formative material. When an adult over-punishes, they are performing something else — perhaps a disordered passion operating under the guise of moral authority. Aquinas called this the movement of the irascible appetite untethered from reason; Vitz, Nordling, and Titus locate it in what they describe as the fallen distortions of the appetitive powers.

Children, the study confirms, can already tell the difference. They may not be able to name what they see, but they register it as a character datum and adjust their moral trust accordingly.

This is not a small finding. One of the primary tasks of early childhood — from a Catholic Christian anthropological standpoint — is the formation of what Aquinas calls connaturality: the habituated sense, trained through repeated exposure to right action, by which a person comes to recognize and desire the good naturally, as if by instinct. When the adults in a child's environment punish proportionately, they are calibrating that instrument. When they punish erratically or harshly, they introduce noise — and over time, distortion.

The father question

The developmental literature has established with considerable consistency that fathers play a specific and irreplaceable role in helping children internalize norms, tolerate frustration, and relate to external authority.¹ Margaret Mead's observation, cited by Cochran and Vitz, that a child needs both a father and a mother continuously present to learn how to be a full member of their own sex while relating to the opposite sex identifies something the data keep confirming: the father is not a redundant copy of the mother but a distinct relational structure the child uses differently.

One of the father's classical developmental functions is precisely in the domain Lee and Solomon are studying: enforcement of limits and the communication of consequences. Fathers who enforce with proportionality — who are neither absent from discipline nor excessive in it — model what law-governed authority looks like. This matters not only for immediate obedience but for the child's emerging capacity to trust authority as such.

Jordan Peterson, drawing on Jean Piaget's analysis of play, has noted that children's moral development is grounded in the internalization of game-like rule structures — the discovery that cooperation requires constraint, and that rule-enforcement is what makes shared life possible.² The child watching an adult punish too harshly is watching someone who has, in effect, broken the rules of the game while claiming to enforce them. This registers as a moral inconsistency, not just an emotional excess.

Nordling's clinical work in child-centered play therapy confirms from the clinical side what the developmental literature predicts: children with histories of harsh, poorly calibrated discipline show measurable elevations in externalizing behaviors — aggression, rule-breaking, attention dysregulation.³ The punitive environment produces, over time, the dysregulation it nominally seeks to correct. Play therapy's recovery mechanisms work in part by providing a relationship in which a trusted adult holds limits without excess, restoring the child's working model of what authority can look like.

Prudence as the governing virtue in discipline

If justice specifies that punishment must correspond to the offense, prudence — the architectonic virtue in Aquinas's account — determines what correspondence actually means in this particular child, at this particular moment, given this particular history.

Prudence is practical wisdom: the capacity to deliberate correctly and to act rightly in the singular case. Generic rules about punishment are inputs to prudence, not replacements for it. A parent who applies the same consequence to every infraction of a given type without considering the child's age, developmental state, motivation, and relational context is not exercising prudence; they are mechanically applying a rule while avoiding the harder work of moral attention.

Lee and Solomon's study does not cover the inner life of the punisher, but the Catholic Christian framework demands we ask about it. Punishment that is too severe is very often not a considered judgment but a response driven by anger, exhaustion, or the parent's own history of having been harshly treated.

The pastoral implication is that helping parents punish proportionately is not only parenting education; it is, in many cases, spiritual accompaniment. The adult needs to look at what is driving their response before they can reliably calibrate it.

What the watching child learns

There is a specific moment in Lee and Solomon's paradigm worth holding: a third child is watching. That child makes moral inferences about the punisher, decides how much to trust that person, and adjusts their willingness to affiliate. This is not a passive registration; it is active moral learning.

The CCMMP framework, following Aquinas, understands that the moral life is not merely a private transaction between an individual and God but a fundamentally social formation project. The human person is, as Maritain argued in The Person and the Common Good, a being whose dignity is constituted in and through right relationships. Children do not learn justice by being lectured about it; they acquire its shape by living in communities where adults embody it.

The harsh punisher does not merely harm the child who receives the punishment. They harm the moral formation of every child who witnesses it. The mild, proportionate punisher does not merely resolve an immediate infraction. They demonstrate to watching children what it looks like when authority and care are held together — when someone who has power uses it in a way that respects the person before them.

That demonstration, repeated across childhood, is how conscience is formed.

Calibrating the correction

Lee and Solomon's research confirms what a serious developmental anthropology would predict: children are calibrating moral trust in real time, and the severity of punishment is one of the primary inputs they use. Proportionate correction — correction that genuinely fits the offense — teaches the watching and the receiving child simultaneously that justice is real and that the authority figure is trustworthy.

For parents and educators working from a Catholic Christian account of the person, this is not merely a pragmatic recommendation. Proportionate punishment is an act of justice and a work of prudence. It forms the child's moral imagination precisely by enacting, within ordinary daily correction, the relationship between love and law that the child will spend the rest of their life learning to understand.

Endnotes

¹ Cochran, S. W., & Vitz, P. C. (n.d.). The role of the father in child development [Unpublished manuscript]. Cited in Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration of psychology and mental health counseling. Divine Mercy University Press.

² Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief. Routledge. See also Piaget, J. (1965). The moral judgment of the child (M. Gabain, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1932)

³ Nordling, W. J. (2020). Child-centered play therapy and the formation of virtue. In Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration of psychology and mental health counseling. Divine Mercy University Press.

Primary Study

Lee, Y.-A., & Solomon, L. H. (2025). Children's moral evaluations of punishers: The role of punishment severity. Developmental Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000000

Additional References

Aquinas, T. (1947). Summa theologiae (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger Bros. (Original work completed 1274)

Maritain, J. (1947). The person and the common good (J. J. Fitzgerald, Trans.). University of Notre Dame Press.

Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration of psychology and mental health counseling. Divine Mercy University Press.