When Donna Daly began taking in foster children 10 years ago, she didn't do it to give her daughter a strong set of ethical and moral values.

But it had that effect.

Her oldest daughter, Jill, now 18, would watch as a steady stream of children, sometimes dirty and badly behaved, and their often even scruffier-looking parents came into her home.

At first Jill was put off by their appearances. "If I just saw them on the street, I would avoid them, but then I would see the kid say, `Oh that's my mother!' and they love that person like I love my mother.

"They become people. You see them as people," said Jill, who lives with her family in East Hampton and will be a freshman at Boston College next month.

When she went to volunteer in a soup kitchen in seventh grade, she immediately tuned in to the needs of the clientele. Many did not look so different from the parents of the children she had come to love.

It gave her a sense of the world as a community in which everyone is interconnected and interdependent.

Jill's experience is typical of how a child or adolescent develops her own system of ethical and moral values.

Those values, experts say, are not something you can sit down and teach your child any more than you would expect your child to really learn about gravity by having you explain it.

A child learns about gravity by letting go of items -- usually toys or food -- and watching them hit the ground. And children develop their own systems of values through firsthand experience with the world.

"Children are not just passive sponges. They make judgments based on experiences," said Melanie Killen, an expert in the social and moral development of children and an associate professor of psychology at Wesleyan University in Middletown. "It's a matter of

a child interacting with parents and peers to make inferences of their own."

Killen and other experts say, however, that although parents cannot teach a child morals, they can help facilitate the development of a moral system. As may be expected, it starts simply when a child is young.

If a child hits another child, a parent's response usually falls into one of three categories. They may simply say, "Don't do that." Or they may say, "There's a rule, no hitting." Or they might tell the child not to do it and explain why the child should not do it. (It hurts the other child, and would you like it if someone did it to you?)

The latter approach is most effective in the moral development of a child because it helps children to understand how their behavior affects someone else. She suggests further talking about why the child hit and what other alternative actions could have been taken.

It's important, she said, to make the dialogue two-way, not simply to lecture.

As a child grows older, the arena for moral development evolves.

During the early preschool years, toys tend to be the bargaining tool for children as they explore the notions of fairness and justice, Killen said.

The development of manners also is a preliminary and important stage in the moral and social growth of young children, according to Steve Reznick, an associate professor of psychology at Yale University.

Later, in elementary school, the development of moral values usually takes place on the playground, where matters such as who is the leader or the captain of a team, Killen said, and turn-taking on the swings and slides are much discussed.

Adolescents are concerned with societal issues such as drug use. Although younger children see issues as only right or wrong, older children are able to discuss the complexities of such issues.

The "Just Say No" campaign against drugs failed, Killen said, because it was simply a rule that did not address the complexities of real life. "It was almost insulting to adolescents," Killen said.

She suggests instead that parents have wide-ranging discussions with older children about their views on drugs.

Often teens view adults as hypocritical and will argue, "Adults drink -- what's the difference?" Killen said. It's important then, to say that drinking can be harmful, Killen said, and to talk about the difference between one beer and six in an hour and the physical consequences of misusing alcohol or using drugs.

As children get older, their thinking about drugs evolves, Killen said. When asked whether they saw drug-use as a personal or moral issue, 10th-grade students tended to say, "It's my body, and I can do whatever I want, even if I harm myself."

The 12th-graders saw drug use as more of moral issue, taking the position that it could harm not only themselves but others in the community and their families.

Killen said her research has shown that peers are more important in the development of a child's values than had been previously thought.

If you watch children interact with others, you will see them negotiate for long periods of time over who gets which toy and why. It is through such actions that they begin to make judgments of

their own about what is right and wrong.

If other children are such a huge factor in a child's moral development, should parents oversee those relationships very closely?

Killen said parents, of course, should oversee their friendships, but if one of their friends behaves badly, it doesn't necessarily mean their child will copy the behavior, and it can be used as a point of discussion.

"Kids are going to come in contact with anti-social behavior," Killen said, and they need to learn how to handle it.

What do you do if your child lies or steals or cheats?

Killen said it's important to sit down and talk with him or her.

"Have an honest two-way conversation. Find out why they did it," she said. "Try to restrain from taking the authority position," but do make your views clear.

To make sure your child understands why these behaviors are bad, suggests Alice Carter, an assistant professor in clinical psychology at Yale University, ask the question: Who gets hurt? Any punishment should fit the crime. If a child stole something from a store, the child could be asked to earn money to pay the store back.

Experts talk about two types of moral obligation. The first is mandatory and includes an obligation not to kill, cheat, steal, lie and so on.

The second level of morality is considered more voluntary: doing good for others, doing charity work.

"You can lead a good life and not be morally offensive" by only observing the first set of moral obligations and not doing the latter, Killen said. Whether a child will feel a desire to help others has a lot to do with the child and the environment he is in.

Carter that if a child sees his parents doing volunteer work and acting benevolently, that child is more likely to do so.

"If you just farm the child out, and it's not something the family does, it won't have the impact," said Carter -- unless it's the child's idea.

Talking about issues as they come up in the news -- whether it be the starvation in Somalia or the carnage in Bosnia -- also helps to attune children to the needs of others.

Donna Daly hadn't realized what an impact the family's foster-care work and Jill's volunteer work had made until she read her daughter's essay answers on her college applications. Much of Jill's writing was focused on the subject.

Daly, who has five children -- including two foster children she adopted -- said Jill's experience has convinced her to require her other children to do volunteer work when they are old enough.

"You have so many hours. You have a lot of advantages, and you need to share those," Daly says. "You need to spend some of your time doing something for somebody else.

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