By admin 
In 2018, I faced particularly challenging situations in my professional and personal life—challenges whose resolution required prayer, reflection, and conversations with multiple trusted individuals. Seeing the arrival of my son and first child was another factor that informed how I decided to navigate these situations. Netflix’s 2025 drama Rotten Legacy (Legado) has stirred these memories.
With a newborn in my arms, I imagined a future conversation with my son around a situation characterized by one or both of the same principles underlying my current situation. What would I say when he asks me for advice? If I give him advice, would it be legitimized by my having upheld said principles in the past? These are legacy-related questions raised by Rotten Legacy.
[Spoilers ahead.] Created by Pablo Alén, Briexo Corral, and Carlos Montero, some view Rotten Legacy as Spain’s answer to Jesse Armstrong’s Succession (2018-2023). The show follows media mogul Federico Seligman (played by Jose Coronado), who, after successfully returning from an illness-related hiatus, tries to salvage his company, El Baltico’s legacy, which he considers in jeopardy by his adult children. They are played by Belén Cuesta (Yolanda), Maria Morera (Lara), Diego Martín (Andrés), and Natalia Huarte (Guadalupe).
…well, because I’m a father. And being a father doesn’t ever come with its own set of directions. – Federico Seligman, Rotten Legacy
While El Baltico’s legacy is front and center throughout the series, I’m interested in the questions Rotten Legacy raises about the moral, ethical, and normative legacies people build, alter, and ultimately leave for others. Legacy questions concerning moral understanding raised in the series are a helpful context for examining similarities and differences between socialization and constructivist approaches to moral development. I compare these approaches in my developmental psychology and moral development classes.
Varying Types of Legacies
Some caveats are in order. First, I distinguish between material (e.g., money, physical structures, etc.) and immaterial (e.g., time, money, values, norms) legacies, and focus exclusively on the latter. Second, while legacies usually refer to what someone who has died in the past has left behind for others in the present, I approach legacies in a broader sense, both in terms of the individuals behind said legacies (e.g., considering what legacies are being built, elaborated, and altered in real time) and the influence of those legacies on those who “receive” them (e.g., how a given legacy affects a person in the present will subsequently affect what that person does and potentially leaves behind in the future, etc.).
Third, “recipients” of legacies can be construed broadly, ranging from narrow (children and family) to wide (i.e., the next generation). Whereas the former might be more readily understood on a practical level, given the importance of families in the human story, social scientists acknowledge the latter’s importance, with Psychologist Erik Erikson’s middle adulthood psychosocial stage of Generativity vs. Stagnation being a notable example.
Lastly, given the difficulties in applying social science theories to popular culture, the brief discussions of socialization and constructivist approaches rely on broad characterizations. Characterizations that do not do justice to their areas of agreement.
Regarding Rotten Legacy, I focused on Federico’s relationships with his adult children (the more narrow conception of legacy), particularly as they inform what they appear to understand about what he expects of them (the immaterial dimensions of legacies). I also focused on how the adult lives his children created for themselves were likely tied to the social contexts they grew up in, which Federico was largely responsible for (how the past informs the present). How might moral development inform our understanding of such dynamics?
Rotten Legacy’s Socialization Approach
You wanna let your children take flight, and at the same time stop them from making mistakes. – Federico Seligman
One way to interpret the series’ significant events is through Federico. His character has viewers examine his actions as a father and media mogul, his relationships with his children, and how he teaches them right and wrong, just and unjust, and so on. His actions, as well as his words, signify what is important and worthy of modeling or adopting.
This interpretation of legacy is consistent with a socialization approach to children’s moral development. Although the approach’s fundamental assumptions about the role of children and the efficacy of parents are being updated due to new evidence, a key feature of socialization perspectives is the robust role parents (and in other contexts, other specific adults) play in children’s moral development.
From this perspective, then, understanding the key legacy questions raised by Rotten Legacy likely starts with considering why his children seek their father’s approval in the ways they do, including angering him in the way they do. Still how far will they go in their moral actions to protect El Baltico, at all costs?
Also important is the extent to which Federico is complicit. He makes a decision that haunts him and affects his children throughout Rotten Legacy. This characterizes a type of “parenting context” within his household, whereby he values the company and its success in such a way that it “bleeds into” how he parents, what he rewards and punishes, and the conversations he has with his children about what’s important in life, and so forth.
Viewing Rotten Legacy Through a Constructivist Perspective
You want them to be good people, but you don’t want them to get walked all over either. – Federico Seligman
The socialization perspective views the parent-child socialization context in co-constructive terms (where parents and children co-construct guidelines and norms to regulate the child’s behavior). However, some socialization scholars argue for a more robust altering of the approach’s fundamental assumptions along these and related lines, a constructivist perspective on moral development suggests a different focal point.
In Rotten Legacy, the influences on the children’s moral understanding are heterogeneous. Their reflective, evaluative, and meaning-making capacities suggest that Yolanda, Lara, Andrés, and Guadalupe, not Federico, should take center stage. This is informed by and influential within many social interactions between persons (e.g., peers, siblings, and parents/caregivers) and within persons between contexts (e.g., siblings at home versus school).
A deep dive into how a constructive perspective on moral development differs from a socialization one when both account for the role of co-construction and share meaning-making is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say the approaches differ in degree and kind.
A constructivist position toward legacy tends to focus on many factors, including peer and sibling interactions, the criteria children use to distinguish between social rules and norms, the goals within their families and broader cultures, and whether they should comply or challenge those rules. Children try to navigate situations involving competing goals/ considerations, ambiguous goals/ considerations, and conflicting messages and directives from different adults (e.g., as when a classroom rule enforced by a teacher may conflict with that of a parent/caregiver). The robust and varied ways children reflect on and (re)consider their actions bear on the moral treatment of others and the effects of those actions on others.
One potential implication of this approach for understanding key events in Rotten Legacy is that the “legacy” the children must navigate as they develop across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood is found in their social worlds, which includes Federico but also others and situations. Moreover, to the extent they can be understood holistically, these social worlds are not static, inalterable modes of influence where messages are communicated to Yolanda, Lara, Andrés, and Guadalupe. It is up to them to accept or reject them.
As active agents constructing their understanding of the world through a variety of informational, affective, and behavioral sources, they are capable of transforming the meaning of values, norms, guidelines, interactions, relationships, they engage with through their relationships with others and others themselves with their ideas, actions, beliefs, etc. This means, for instance, that their moral understanding of their father (in terms of their relationships with him and his actions related to the company), and their beliefs about what can be morally justified to preserve the company, have dynamic and multifaceted influences that cannot be reduced to their relationships with Federico or anyone else.
It also means that within various contexts, their social interactions, reflections, and moral judgments had (as children and adolescents) and have (as adults) the potential to influence Federico’s decisions and those within his social world in ways that might lead him to change. His attempt to repair certain aspects of his relationships with his children alters how they might remember him, ultimately making amends for some of the “rotten” aspects of his legacy.
Rotten Legacy and Morality
Recent efforts in moral development scholarship have tried to bridge some aspects of socialization and constructivist approaches to moral development. Both approaches explore the complex ways people influence and are influenced by others, a phenomenon Rotten Legacy explores in thought-provoking ways.
Whether one is inclined to side with one approach over the other or remain neutral, as individuals who care about, for, and alongside others, questions related to legacy will eventually animate some of our actions in the moral domain. Integrating these questions into our choices will hopefully make us and those around us better off in the long run.
Works Cited
Gibbs, John C. Moral Development and Reality: Beyond the Theories of Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt. Fourth Edition. Cambridge University Press. 2019.
Grusec, Joan E. “Moral Development from a Socialization Perspective”. In Handbook of Moral Development, 3rd Edition. Edited by Melanie Killen and Judith G. Smetana. Routledge. 2023.
Kuczynski, Leon, and Jan De Mol. Dialectical models of socialization. In Theory and Method, edited by Willis. F. Overton and Peter. C. M. Molenaar. Volume 1 of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, 7th Edition. Wiley. 2015.
Recchia, Holly, and Wainryb, Cecilia. The Role of Conversations in Moral Development. In Handbook of Moral Development, 3rd Edition, edited by Melanie Killen and Judith G. Smetana. Routledge. 2023.
Smetana, Judith G., and Yoo, Ha Na. Development and Variations in Moral and Social-Conventional Judgments: A Social Domain Theory Approach. In Handbook of Moral Development, 3rd Edition, edited by Melanie Killen and Judith G. Smetana. Routledge. 2023.
Slater, Charles L. Generativity versus Stagnation: An Elaboration of Erikson’s Adult Stage of Human Development. Journal of Adult Development, Vol. 10. October 2003.