When children are not afraid of being punished, they are perfectly willing to come forward and make restitution. Piaget pointed out that all sanctions by reciprocity can quickly degenerate into punishments, if mutual affection and respect are lacking between adult and child. Indeed, mutual respect is essential if a child is to develop autonomy. The child who feels respected for the way he or she things feels is likely also to respect the way adults and other children think and feel. Piaget's theory about how child learn moral values is fundamentally different from other theories and from common sense.
Common sense suggests that a child internalizes moral values from the environment.
According to Piaget, however, children acquire moral values by constructing them from within, thru interactions with their environments. For example, no child is taught that it is worse to tell a lie to an adult than to another child. Yet young children construct this believe out of their own experiences. But young children construct such judgments by relating these two statements to everything they have previously been told. It is probably safe to say that most of us were punished as children.