Kohlberg's (1976, 1981) theory showed the sequence of an individual's moral development followed a six-stage progression, Higher stages represented moral maturity, in other words, justice reasoning. Gilligan (1982), however, opposed Kohlberg's ideas claiming that there are two different moral domains: the domain of care and responsibility and the domain of justice and rights. According to her, women predominantly use the care-oriented moral reasoning, while men predominantly use the justice-oriented moral reasoning. Research shows that the majority of people, regardless of their gender; use both the justice and care reasoning in their moral decisions (Bebeau and Brabeck, 1994) and little support for the view that there is a generalized distinction between men and women in their orientations (Colby and Damon, 1994). There is evidence in the literature that parenting style plays a substantial role in children's moral development. Research indicates parents' interaction styles are predictive of children's moral reasoning development (Walker and Hennig, 1999), and certain child-rearing attitudes are instrumental in the promotion of caring in children and adolescents (Lansdale, Wakschlag, and Gunn, 1995). This present study aims to explore the influence of parents' child-rearing attitudes on the moral orientation and moral reasoning of their children. In this study, the Measure of Moral Orientation-MMO (Liddell, Halpin, and Ilcdpin, 1992) and the Defining Issues Test-DIT (Rest, 1986) were completed by 60 Turkish undergraduate students (30 males and 30 females) and Parental Attitude Research Instrument-PARI (Oner, 1996) was administered to their parents (60 mothers and 60 fathers). The results show some relationships between the tests. Analyses showed that offsprings were not differentiated on the moral orientation and moral reasoning subtests except 'self care' in terms of gender. In what conditions parents punish their offsprings affect the offsprings' moral reasoning. When we investigated the parental child rearing attitudes, it was seen that gender of the offsprings is an important factor among the relationships between attitudes, moral orientation and moral reasoning. Relationships were found among these variables especially for boys.
