Raising Caring, Moral, and Thriving Children
On Wednesday, November 12th, 2025, from 1-1:50 PM in FXB G12 and online, all are welcome to join us for the third installment in our Virtues for Well-being seminar series. This event will feature Richard Weissbourd, Director of the Making Caring Common Project and Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Event Description
This talk will take up how we can raise caring, moral children in today’s world. Richard Weissbourd will make the case that the intense focus on achievement and happiness in child-raising has crowded out attention to children’s moral development and that all the focus on happiness is, ironically, making children less happy. He will offer concrete ideas for how we can raise children who are both moral and likely to thrive. Weissbourd will also take up how moral failures in our public life pose specific threats to moral development and how we can mitigate these harms and develop in children key capacities they will need to strengthen our communities and democracy.
Speaker Biography
Richard Weissbourd is a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and he also teaches at the Kennedy School of Government. His work focuses on moral development, meaning, and purpose, mental health challenges among teens and young adults, and effective schools and services for children facing risks. He directs the Making Caring Common Project, a national effort to make moral and social development priorities in child-raising, and to provide strategies to schools and parents for promoting in children caring, a commitment to justice and other key moral and social capacities. He leads an initiative to reform college admissions, Turning the Tide, which seeks to elevate ethical character, reduce excessive achievement pressure, and increase equity and access in the college admissions process. He is also conducting research on how older adults can better mentor young adults and teenagers in developing caring, mature romantic relationships.
He is a founder of several interventions for children facing risks, including ReadBoston and WriteBoston, city-wide literacy initiatives that were led by Mayor Menino. He is also a co-founder of a pilot school in Boston, the Lee Academy, that begins with children at 3 years old. He has advised on the city, state and federal levels on family policy, parenting and school reform and has written for numerous scholarly and popular publications and blogs, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today and NPR. He is the author of The Vulnerable Child: What Really Hurts America’s Children and What We Can Do About It (Addison-Wesley, 1996), named by the American School Board Journal as one of the top 10 education books of all time. His most recent book, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development (Houghton Mifflin 2009), was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 24 books of 2009.
Speaker Information
Richard Weissbourd
Organizers
ⓘ Harvard Chan School hosts a diverse array of speakers, invited to share both scholarly research and personal perspectives. They do not speak for the School, and hosting them does not imply endorsement of their views, organizations, or employers.