Abstract
Discussions of moral education usually focus on children who already have a good relationship with their parents. But moral education also depends on what happens very early in a child’s life. A loved child will empathically register parental love as a form of sympathetic tendency that is equivalent to gratitude, and such imbibed attitudes can help further moral development. But children crave love, and if a child isn’t loved or is actually abused, that may produce a generalized rage that precludes positive moral development. Care ethics has neglected the ways in which a child may be made incapable of empathically caring about others, and, despite all its talk of mothering, hasn’t recognized that empathy can convert a young child’s being the object of sympathetic concern into an enhanced capacity for such concern on the part of the child.