The Moral Life of Children <i> by Robert Coles (The Atlantic Monthly: $19.95; 352 pp., illustrated)</i> : The Political Life of Children<i> by Robert Coles (The Atlantic Monthly: $19.95; </i> 264<i> pp., illustrated)</i>

Trained as a pediatrician and child psychoanalyst, Robert Coles has spent his professional life exploring and illuminating the inner world of the child. In the process, he has created an impressive body of work, crowned by the Pulitzer Prize-winning, multivolume “Children of Crisis” series.

In his writings, Coles has seemingly ignored the delineation between the academic and the popular, producing books that are scholarly, yet accessible, writing with warmth, clarity and grace that set him apart in a field notorious for jargon-laden puffery. (It is no coincidence that among his major influences are doctor-novelists William Carlos Williams and Walker Percy.) More important, he is a researcher with integrity, stating his biases forthrightly (agnostic, left-leaning white liberal) and taking pains to tease out their impact upon his conclusions. And here is one psychoanalyst who eschews the protective omnipotence of the unseen interviewer: When Coles interviews a child, it is clear that two human beings are present, each influencing the other.

But what truly distinguishes this self-described “inveterate loner and wanderer” are context and scope, for Coles has traded the comforts and limitations of the psychotherapist’s office for the streets and fields of America, seeking out a broad range of children--the offspring of migrants, Eskimos, Indians, the affluent--talking, playing, drawing, interpreting, in an attempt to learn how their development has been affected by the social roles assigned them through the vagaries of nature and nurture.

In “The Moral Life of Children” and “The Political Life of Children,” Coles’ lab has been expanded to embattled societies outside the United States--Brazil, Nicaragua, Poland, South Africa, Northern Ireland and French Canada. His 35th and 36th books, respectively, they are re-analyses of data--transcripts, drawings and paintings--accumulated over two and a half decades, a final, lingering look prior to permanent deposition in the University of North Carolina library.

“The Moral Life of Children” is loosely constructed around a pair of mega-questions: What is morality and from whence does it spring? Coles criticizes models of moral development, such as Lawrence Kohlberg’s, that too strongly correlate morality with intelligence. Quoting Percy’s warning that it is possible to “get all A’s and flunk life,” he offers a brief sample of moral outrages committed by the highly intelligent and describes numerous instances of moral vitality displayed by the “cognitively limited.”

Having found cognitive-based theories wanting, Coles searches elsewhere, exploring the psychoanalytic view of altruism as a form of masochism, but remaining clearly dissatisfied with this cynical view of the world. He finds his psychiatric training sometimes irrelevant, even obstructive because of its obsession for value-free analysis and notes “as I got nearer and nearer to becoming . . . a child psychiatrist, I heard less and less about ‘character’ and more and more about ‘character disorders.’ ” Repeating Gordon Allport’s caution that “no amount of psychoanalysis, even an interminable stretch of it . . . can provide a strong conscience to a person who has grown up in such a fashion as to become chronically dishonest, mean-spirited, a liar.” Coles journeys into theology, social science and popular culture--one chapter is devoted to the moral images created by movies and television--but emerges with only meager clues, and in the end, settles for re-description--the terse but unilluminating assessment of character as “a moral center that was, quite simply, there.”

Along the way, however, he offers a fascinating banquet of vignettes, children whose deeds, thoughts and feelings resonate with moral strength. There is Ruby, a black child, living in the New Orleans of the ‘50s, who braved daily threats, humiliation and danger at the hands of racist mobs in order to desegregate a school, all the while praying for her oppressors. And Hank, “from a family all too easily labeled by the likes of me, ‘redneck,’ ” son of an abusive, hard-drinking, Klan-sympathizing father--who must undergo “dramatic moral shifts” in order to reconcile the racism he has learned at home with his personal--and moral--view of the world.

On the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Coles encounters a 17-year-old prostitute who’ll do virtually anything for money but donates much of her earnings to the wretched poor and fights angrily to maintain a psychic boundary between behavior and self-concept. During a chance meeting in that same city of extremes, he comes upon 10-year-old Eduardo, a street-hustling favelado who, after panhandling Coles and eyeing his money, warns: “You had better hide; the whole world will be upon you--and then you’ll have to beg, too!” Intrigued, the psychiatrist tracks the boy down and interviews him, discovering a slum child who, despite a daily struggle to survive, has managed to develop a fierce moral code and a trenchant philosophy of life: “We are here to stay for a while, and if we’re lucky, we’ll leave people behind who like us, and when our name is mentioned, they smile and clap.”

In “The Political Life of Children,” Coles conceptualizes the family as a mini-state typified by a perpetual jockeying for power and suggests that nationalism results from the transfer of parental authority to the state. He criticizes the social psychology research of the ‘50s that found children inevitably rating political leaders as benevolent and contends that youngsters react individually and idiosyncratically, despite remaining outwardly faithful to social norms. The material he produces to back this up is by and large unsurprising--South African children on both sides of the color line, emotionally constricted youngsters in Northern Ireland struggling with religious hatred, Polish children who love their country while coldly despising their government, Nicaraguan students parroting anti-American slogans--but no less convincing and poignant for that.

Coles has an affection for Dickens, and there is a Dickensian flavor to these two books, and to some extent, to Coles’ work in general: He is a master chronicler, providing few answers but asking his questions so eloquently that his writings emerge as classic portrayals of social upheaval and its effect upon the young.