Is Socrates a Good Parenting Coach? Moral Development and Parenting Style

Studies show that your style of talking through moral issues can significantly impact the development of your child's moral reasoning skills. So how should you help little Johnny think through his situation involving a pal from school who thinks it's okay to bully others? Or how do you handle a teen's question about some morally complex issue? "Dad, is it right to eat animals raised in factory farms?" (this isn't too unlikely. When I was a teen, I ran into myriads of PETA advocates at rock shows!). Studies suggest that a gentle Socratic approach to moral discussion (asking questions, probing for understanding, paraphrasing your discussion-partners argument) better promotes moral development in children/teens. Here's a short and helpful snippet from Walker and Hennig's paper on these studies:

"[P]arenting style is influential in children's moral development...The parenting style most conducive to children's development can be encapsulated as involving supportive Socratic dialogue...The concordant findings from two studies provide clear evidence that the nature of parents' interactions, ego functioning and moral reasoning are predictive of children's moral development. Parents who engage in cognitively challenging and highly opinionated interactions, who are hostile, critical, and interfering, and who display [high levels of] defensiveness, rigidity, rationalizations, insensitivity, [and] inappropriate emotional expression provide a context that hinders children's opportunities to move toward more mature moral understandings. In contrast, effective parents are more child-centered and scaffold their child's development  by eliciting the child's opinions, drawing out the child's reasoning with appropriate probing questions, and checking for understanding; all in the context of emotional support and attentiveness and with the challenging stimulation of more advanced moral reasoning [1].

Merely informing your child about the right moral action/solution might help them act the right way in a certain situation (or give them right answer), but this approach may not be as beneficial to their moral reasoning skills in the long run. Having said that, I think there are times when children (and adults) need to see good moral reasoning modeled by someone else. Sometimes I can't see through the moral weeds. So just give me the argument for why it is morally good/bad to [fill in the blank]. I suspect a lot of kids will appreciate this too. Of course, if there is a Socratic way of doing this, groovy.
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Footnote:

[1] "Parenting Style and the Development of Moral Reasoning" (1999); Journal of Moral Education.