In this episode, Richard Weissbourd explores why raising caring, moral children may be one of the most urgent challenges of our time. He reveals how parents, schools, and society can help young people thrive—not just by chasing achievement or happiness, but by learning to care for others and the common good.
In this episode of Frontiers in Health and Happiness, host Ayla Fudala speaks with Richard Weissbourd, senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of the Making Caring Common Project, about what it means to raise caring, moral, and thriving children in today’s world.
Weissbourd explains why moral development is not just about beliefs, but about capacities like empathy, perspective-taking, justice, and caring for people beyond our immediate circles. He discusses how parents and schools can help children develop these capacities, why achievement and happiness often crowd out caring, and how an over-focus on children’s moment-to-moment emotions can unintentionally undermine their well-being.
The conversation also explores Making Caring Common’s work with families and schools, the Turning the Tide initiative to reform college admissions, the impact of social media and public life on children’s moral growth, and why caring for others is essential not only for children’s happiness, but for the health of our communities and democracy.
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Ayla Fudala: Hello and welcome to Frontiers in Health and Happiness, the official podcast of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. My name is Ayla Fudala, Center Senior Communications Coordinator, and I'll be asking experts how to live a healthy, happy life.
This is the third episode in our Virtues for Well-being series. In this series, we're taking a deep dive into the virtues that shape our lives, our health and our happiness. We've explored how purpose can inspire resilience and fortitude, and how empathy can access to ourselves and one another.
In this episode, we turn to virtues at the heart of strong communities: caring and moral character. Today's guest is Richard Weissbourd, senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a nationally recognized leader in the study of moral development in children and teens. As director of the Making Caring Common Project, Mr. Weissbourd spearheads efforts to put moral development at the heart of child raising by equipping parents and schools with research-based strategies to nurture empathy and justice. He also leads the Turning the Tide initiative, dedicated to reforming college admissions by promoting ethical character, reducing excessive achievement pressure, and expanding equity and access.
Today, Mr. Weissbourd will help us explore what it means to raise caring, moral children in a complex world and how parents and educators can work together to help kids thrive, not just succeed.
My first question is what does it mean to be a moral, caring person, and how do you define and measure these qualities?
Richard Weissbourd: Well, let me take up the first one. Um, when we when I think about morality and in our work on morality, it's not about moral beliefs. It's not about whether you're pro-life or pro-choice, for example. It's about certain moral capacity. So the capacity, the motivation to care for other people, the motivation to pursue justice, moral. We call that moral identity, the capacity to manage destructive feelings like shame, jealousy, envy, arrogance, things that can cause you to transgress. It's empathy. It's the ability to take other perspectives, feel how other people feel, care about other people. So we're really talking about certain moral capacities. It's you define these in each one in different ways. You measure each one in different ways, and they're hard to measure. I mean, all of these are hard to measure to some extent, but there are certainly ways that you can measure them. And in our schoolwork, we measure them by proxy. So we are really looking at whether we're changing school environments is an environment that kids experience, is caring and fair, as committed to reducing bigotry and bias and bullying. And our assumption is if kids are in environments like that, they are more likely to develop these capacities.
Ayla Fudala: How would you measure if a child was caring? Is there a way to measure that at all?
Richard Weissbourd: Well, you know, we do this on surveys. You know, there are altruism scales that are validated. There are empathy scales that are validated. All of these have problems, but there are ways you can do that. You can ways you can do that. I tend to think that the best way to do this is often by looking, you know, behavioral observations that teachers make, that other students make. Hopefully you can get other people, you know, rarely you can get sort of 360 evaluations, but that are looking at people's actual behavior day to day and whether they are attuned to other people, supporting other people, helping other people. All those are meaningful indicators.
Ayla Fudala: So when you say caring, you mean altruism, acts of service for others?
Richard Weissbourd: Well, I would say caring is generally comprised of a few different things, as is empathy. One is a cognitive component is being able to take someone else's perspective. Like, one of the things I'm not crazy about the golden rule is treat other people the way you want to be treated. It's really you should treat other people the way they want to be treated. And that often requires taking other perspectives. I think caring is also involves tuning into other people's feelings, knowing what they're feeling, experiencing those feelings. And caring also involves valuing other people. So it's those three things I think it's taking other perspectives experience other people's feeling and valuing other people. And I would add, almost all of us care for somebody. You know, we talk about caring as a quantity. Sometimes we either have a lot of it or a little of it, but we almost always care for a lot for a family member or romantic partner or close friend. In many ways, the big challenge is caring for people who are different from us in race, class, gender, unfamiliar to us, even irritating to us. If we want to live in a society that works democratically, that functions that that supports collective flourishing, we have to help kids not just care for people who are like them, but care for people that are different from them and even care for people who may annoy them. There's an art to caring, you know. It's a skill to. It's a craft in a way, you know? So the people who are the most effective carers, like, know when to praise and know when to criticize. They know how to ask thoughtful questions that are not intrusive. It's it's a skill that needs we need practice and we need feedback to get better at. And particularly kids need practice and feedback.
Ayla Fudala: How does caring impact children's mental, social and physical health?
Richard Weissbourd: Well, you know, I think when people care, they tend to have better relationships. And better relationships are the most durable and robust source of happiness that we have. So I think caring is important to kids mental health. I think when kids when adults are caring, it also supports our collective flourishing. And when we are collectively, collectively flourishing, we're all rising to some degree. So I think it does support and there's, you know, some evidence that it supports mental health. But I want to just clarify something. I think it's really important to tell kids to be caring, to be caring not because it's going to make them happier or because it's going to improve their mental health. I think we have, you know, have gotten away from saying that morality, caring, focusing, other people are just important for their own sake. They're important even if they don't make you healthier, happier.
Ayla Fudala: What inspired you personally to focus your career on moral development and child well-being?
Richard Weissbourd: You know, it was in the water when I was growing up. You know, it was part of my family identity in a way that I'm very grateful for. You know, for my parents. Part of my identity is that we had we were had good fortune, and we should be engaged in serving other people in different ways. It was my mother's career, early childhood provider, did a lot of work and family support. My father was a real estate developer developer who started in one of his buildings, a center for psychosocial studies that focused on moral development. I was I've been given moral dilemmas since I was about eight years old. It was part of the fabric of my family. So it was very much part of my the fabric of my family. But in the last 20 years, and particularly in the last few years, you know, I worry that we are as a country, we are in a moral freefall, that a lot of our moral standards are deteriorating. And so my I feel like it's more urgent and important than ever that people focus on what it means to lead a moral life.
Ayla Fudala: What's the most important thing to parents and to children? Achievement, happiness or caring?
Richard Weissbourd: When we ask kids what's most important to you and what's most important to your parents? Caring, happiness or achievement. And people mean different things by caring, happiness, achievements. So, you know, we've asked them to define what you mean by caring, happiness, achievement, etc. but broadly speaking, we find that either happiness or achievement tends to come in first and caring comes in third. So children are more likely to say the happiness or achievement are more important than caring. And when you ask them how, how do you think your parents would rank these values for you? They're more likely to say that they'd rank achievement first, happiness second, caring third. So that was troubling to us, because I think the degree to which we have elevated individual success and advancement, achievement and happiness is the primary goals of child raising and demoted or sidelined, caring for other people. I'm not a child's historian, but when I've talked to the child historians, the degree to which we've done that may be unprecedented in our history. And we need kids who really prioritize caring for others and caring for the common good. And adults.
Ayla Fudala: How can parents and schools raise children who are all three successful, happy and caring?
Richard Weissbourd: I don't think these things are incompatible. I mean, you can be, you know, you. My guess is you're somebody who's caring and happy and high achieving. I mean, a lot of people can be caring, happy and high achieving. The point that we're making is that we're out of balance. We're too focused on achievement, well-being and often not focused enough on caring and caring for the common good. And you know, your question is a big one, because there's so many things that people, parents can do to support achievement and support happiness, support caring. But I would put two things front and center. I think one is caring relationships, supporting your kids and having close relationships because they are so important to well-being and helping your kids find what's meaningful to them and gives their life meaning and a sense of purpose. It doesn't need to be one thing. It doesn't need to be a single purpose, but things that are meaningful And I think, you know, one of the problems I'm having with the mental health, the way we talk about mental health problems in this country, is that a lot of it is. I don't think it's focused on therapy and medication. I don't think we're going to therapy as our Medicaid, our way out of this mental health problem. I think we really need to think about how do we help kids, young adults who are the highest risk, develop caring relationships? How do we help them find meaning and purpose?
Ayla Fudala: I've heard that focusing too much on achievement can be detrimental, but I've never heard that focusing too much on happiness could backfire. Can you tell me more about that?
Richard Weissbourd: Yeah, I think focusing on happiness too much can backfire. I mean, just to give you an example, you know, I see parents on playgrounds sometimes and they're focusing on their kids moment to moment moods. Does that make you sad? Does that make you angry? It's like the mood police are out, and, you know, it's very important. I want to be clear about this. It's very important to get kids to identify and articulate their feelings. But I think when we focus too much on kids feelings, it can turn their inner lives into theater. They can become too focused on how they feel moment to moment. They can make their feelings too precious. They can become too self occupied. And we would be better if we focus less on how they were feeling moment to moment, and more on tuning them into how other kids are feeling moment to moment. Because if they can tune into other how other kids are feeling the moment, at the moment, they're going to be better friends. They're going to be better parents, they're going to be better romantic partners. And those are the greatest sources of happiness that we have.
Ayla Fudala: So prioritizing social connection and that eventually will lead to happiness.
Richard Weissbourd: Yeah. I mean, another example is the name of promoting kids happiness. There are a lot of parents have a kind of allergy to adversity. You know, they're swooping into resolving minor peer conflicts. They're very quick to withdraw their kids from a team where they're where they might lose. And dealing with adversity is core to our happiness. So, you know, again, in the name, the things that parents can do to promote or protect their kids happiness can unintentionally undermine their capacity for well-being.
Ayla Fudala: What is the making caring common project and what does it do?
Richard Weissbourd: Making caring common was born out of this concern about the degree to which we have elevated individual success as the primary goal of child raising and demoted caring for other people. So part of what we're trying to do is put caring for others front and center in child raising again, and we work with schools. We work with parents on giving them schools, parents low burden, you know, energizing, easy to implement strategies, tools that build empathy, that builds social awareness, that build an understanding of fairness and a commitment to fairness, that build caring across difference. Empathy for people who are different from you. We do research on many topics, but, you know, the last several years on loneliness, on sexual harassment, on on bullying, on mental health troubles. And the reason we do that is I think things like loneliness, anxiety, depression, they're often signals of our failure to care for each other. And part of what we're doing is, is making the case through our research that if we focused on caring for each other more, we would have fewer of these problems less bullying, less mental health troubles, less loneliness. And we also do a lot of work with colleges and college admissions. And that's around changing the signals that kids get about what's important.
Ayla Fudala: Are there any interventions or resources available at the Making Caring, Common project that can help parents and educators?
Richard Weissbourd: Yeah, no. We have a ton of resources on our website, and we have a Caring Schools Network, which is, you know, a group of schools that work with us pretty intensively. We have circle of Concern exercise. Who's in your circle of concern? Who's not in your circle of concern? Are humans at your school exercise, which is getting kids to understand and appreciate kids who have been invisible to them? We do relationship mapping, which is asking all the adults in the school building to identify those kids that they have a trusting, caring relationship with. And one of the things you find is a bunch of kids have a star next their name. They have a lot of trusting, caring relationships, and a bunch of kids have no relationships. And that's your map. We're going to make sure every kid is anchored to a caring adult. So those are just examples of the kinds of resources and strategies that we give to schools.
Ayla Fudala: That's amazing. Can you tell me about the Turning the Tide initiative?
Richard Weissbourd: Yeah, turning the tide is our college admissions work, and we started maybe ten years ago. The idea is that right now, college admissions tends to send kick signals to kids. That would matters. And particularly the elite universities send this signal that what matters is long brag sheets. It's, you know, how many AP courses you have, how many extracurricular activities you're engaged in, and very a de prioritizing low priority to meaningful intellectual engagement like passion for learning and meaningful ethical engagement. Being a good person day to day, contributing to your community, caring about fairness. And so we've been trying to change the messages that college admissions send to young people and by proxy, what society sends to young people, because college admissions, in a way, are powerfully signaling what the adult world wants. And we think it's critical that the adult world signal that we want young people who are going to contribute to their communities, who are going to protect democracy, who are going to advance justice, who are going to care for the vulnerable and the marginalized. So we want college admissions to send those signals. And our first report, we got about 150 colleges signing on. You know, we had a report that had 300 colleges signing on. That, again, is emphasizing ethical character. It's emphasizing meaningful engagement. And so we're going to keep at it. And you know we keep working with colleges around sending signals and and accurately and validating, wildly assessing ethical character in the admissions process and giving more priority to kids who are meaningfully engaged ethically and intellectually.
Ayla Fudala: Have you done that work with Harvard?
Richard Weissbourd: Yes, Harvard. The first turning the tide report. The dean of admissions at Harvard was very involved with. And all the Ivy League schools endorsed it, actually.
Ayla Fudala: Wow. That's wonderful. So if I was applying to Harvard, this would send me the signal that, like, my resume, should have just as many volunteering opportunities as AP classes and straight A's?
Richard Weissbourd: We were emphasizing it's not about quantity. It's not about how many times you volunteered. It's not about how many extracurricular activities. It's not about, to some degree, how many AP courses you take, although some colleges do prioritize large numbers of AP courses. It's about quality, you know. And were you meaningfully engaged in those AP courses? Can you describe what you learned an essay or pull on what you learned in an essay in a way that really shows that you were meaningfully engaged when you had a volunteer or service experience? What did you learn from it about helping other people, about yourself, about how the world changes or doesn't change in response to your actions? About whether or not you want to volunteer as an adult and you know what role you want to play as an adult in providing service to others. So again, you know, our focus was mainly on quality not quantity.
Ayla Fudala: How do events in the broader world, such as news or public life, impact kids’ sense of right and wrong?
Richard Weissbourd: So they can in a lot of ways. And you know, it just depends. You know, kids see a lot of adults who are corrupt or acting petty in public life or who are lying or who are vindictive. You know, that can all have an influence on kids, and it can suggest that those kind of behaviors are okay. And so it's really important we talk to kids about those behaviors when they're aware of them. And we talk to them about what's wrong about them. And we help we understand how they're processing them, and we tune in to how they're processing those events. And we respond in the context of how the meaning they're making, how they're making sense of those events.
Ayla Fudala: Do you have any advice for parents or educators concerned about negative influences from social media on children's moral growth?
Richard Weissbourd: I think social media is absolutely a contributing factor to a lot of emotional problems that kids are having. I don't think it's the sole contributing factor. And I'm and I worry about being too quick to blame social media for everything. I think there are a lot of other things that are going on, but I think it's really important that kids, that parents become more literate about their kids’ social media use. I think it's important that parents help kids use social media positively and not just negatively, that a lot of kids are doing good things on social media. They're connecting. They're making friends. They're lonely. Kids are meeting kids that are like them on social media. They're starting causes, and parents should know about those things, too. And I think we ought to really regulate the amount of time kids are on social media and on their phones. I mean, I think the, you know, the movement to ban cell phones in schools is a really important movement. I think parents have to limit cell phone, smartphone and social media use technology use. Absolutely.
Ayla Fudala: How does a focus on moral development in children contribute to the health and resilience of our democracy?
Richard Weissbourd: I think democracy is largely or in big part, only as good as the people who are participating in it and whether or not and whether they're going to honor it and whether they're going to contribute to it and whether they're going to be responsive to other people. I mean, if we want to have free and open debate, which I think is critical for democracy, we have to have kids who can talk to people who don't share their perspective, who have opposing views. We have to have people well-functioning democracy. We need people who care about people who are different from them, who are understanding their biases. We need people who care about the common good, you know, who are thinking not just about themselves, but about the common good. So I think moral development is absolutely at the heart of a functioning, healthy democracy.
Ayla Fudala: Finally, what gives you hope for the future of our children and our communities?
Richard Weissbourd: There's a lot that gives me hope. You know I will. I will mention a couple of things. I mean, in the area of mental health, I think this is the most emotionally mental, health literate, emotionally aware generation of young people in our history. The vocabulary they have for talking about anxiety and depression and trauma is entirely different than the vocabulary of my generation. I worry about too much focus on our inner lives, as I've said, but I think the appreciation for an understanding of mental health in this generation is really impressive, and I think this is the generation that is going to break the stigma around, and partly has broken the stigma around mental health in this, in this country. So I think that's important. I also think this is a group of young people, Gen Z, who, you know, a lot of them are initiating leading social causes, whether it's on gun violence or climate or a whole range of issues and very impressive ways. I find this generation of young people is very focused on close relationships. And how do you develop, cultivate, maintain close relationships? So I think they're very impressive in that way. So I think, you know, there's a lot that that makes me hopeful.
Ayla Fudala: Do you have any last words of advice for our audience?
Richard Weissbourd: You know, I think my one final word is that I don't think there's anything more, more important that we can do as parents and educators than to help kids care for other people. I think if you look at the problems we're having in our society right now, hyperpolarization, loneliness, the inability to talk across political difference, mental health troubles, the sense of dystopia, disconnection, alienation, you know, rates of these things are high. I think all these things are puzzles with many pieces. But one big, big piece of the puzzle is that we haven't really prioritized caring for other people, and that our collective flourishing, our democracy, absolutely depends on our caring for other people in the common good. And it's also crucial to our happiness. So that's the message that I want to leave people with.
Ayla Fudala: Thank you so much to Richard Weissbourd for joining us today and sharing his thoughtful perspective on how to raise caring, moral, and thriving children. If you'd like to learn more, we encourage you to explore his books and the resources available on the Making Caring Common Project website.
And don't miss our next episode when we'll be joined by Dr. Richard Davidson, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the center for Healthy Minds. A pioneer in the science of emotion. Dr. Davidson will take us inside the brain to explore how cultivating well-being changes our minds, bodies, and the world around us.
This has been another episode of Frontiers in Health and Happiness, the official podcast of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. To learn about upcoming events, visit our website, sign up for our mailing list and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook, and YouTube. New episodes in our virtues for wellbeing series will air every two weeks. Episodes can be found on the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness website and YouTube channel, as well as on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever else podcasts are found. Thank you for listening.