Children's Right to Freedom, Care and Enlightenment

Bertram Bandman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780815321316
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136519239
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Professor Bandman presents a philosophical argument in answer to the question, How do we justifiably bring up our children? Bandman suggests that the status of children's rights in collusion with the method by which children are raised result in the strength and breadth of our rights as adults. This is an eminently worthwhile study, involving the interests of younger and older people alike, engaging us all in reflective examination of issues right at our doorsteps.

PART I

Toward a Justification of Adults' and Children's Rights

CHAPTER ONE

Between Protectionism and Liberationism—The Functions and Limits of Children's Rights

TWO VIEWS THAT INITIATE THIS STUDY

In this chapter I consider the main aspects of two prevalent views that are taken on children's rights. The first of these is protectionism, the view that adults rather than children have rights; the second is liberationism, the view that children have essentially equal rights with adults.

I argue that there are two further views that the debate between protectionism and liberationism has left out. I call the first of these indifference. This is the view that parents need not feel shame or responsibility for ignoring their children's interests. The second of these positions that are between protectionism and liberationism I call development. In this chapter, I will try to argue against protectionism, liberationism, and indifference, and I will try to argue not only for children's development, but also for children's rights to develop. If children have such rights, the implication is that children have at least some rights, but not the rights attributed to them by liberationists, and not the rights denied to them by protectionists.

CHALLENGING ISSUES FOR CHILDREN'S RIGHTS: PROTECTIONISM AND LIBERATIONISM

There are several opinions as to how children should develop. Protectionists argue that the appropriate attitude for children is to learn to be compliant, perhaps even obedient, to adjust to authority, and to become responsible. In this view, children should act according to the wishes, interests, demands, and specifications of adults whose duties are to provide for them. According to this view, children should do as they are told. There are even sterner voices who say that children should be seen and not heard, unless they are spoken to. In such a view, there is no need for children to have rights. To these critics of children's rights, the very idea is an abomination.

There is another view as to how children are to develop; and that is that each parent, each group or subculture or religion decides what is the best way to raise one's children.

There are, of course, some other opinions. One is that although most parents, teachers, and other adults may have the best of intentions in raising children, the processes and results of children's upbringing is not necessarily beneficial to children. Some children readily become victims of negligence, carelessness, or abuse. Infants and children are, in addition, especially vulnerable and prone to being neglected or mistreated. In this view, and because of these facts and circumstances, children need protection.

As a seedling or young blade of grass needs to be given extra care and nurture, so a child needs extra care as well. Infants, for example, need their diapers changed periodically. Failure to do so makes infants uncomfortable and, in time, provides obstacles to their development. One form of protection and of child advocacy is that adult duties to children are an insufficient form of child protection; that adult love of children, valuable as it is when it occurs, is not a sufficient form of protection, and that a minimally adequate form of protection of children's legitimate interests requires the recognition of children's rights. These rights are not gratuitous or frivolous, nor are these rights synonyms for children's unbridled power.

The debate about whether children have rights is essentially between two groups, protectionists and liberationists. Protectionists, such as Laura Purdy,¹ Jeffrey Blustein, William Ruddick,² and Francis Schrag³ favor adult's rights over children's interests. Liberationists favor the same rights as adults have, such as those of self-determination, which include the right to vote, to keep their own money, to decide whether to go to school or not. Liberationists include Howard Cohen,⁴ C. Wringe,⁵ Richard Farson,⁶ Bob Franklin,⁷ David Archard,⁸ and Gareth Matthews.⁹

Protectionists argue that adults know best how to protect children's interests. In their commitment to children's interests, protectionists favor children's development, assuming that adults have the right to decide how such development occurs.

Writers like Laura Purdy, Jeffrey Blustein, Francis Schrag, and William Ruddick, who are protectionists critical of children's rights, share the viewpoint of placing adult family rights over children's rights to develop. Although Ruddick is not necessarily representative of other protectionists, he presents this example of parent-child relationships:

Suppose a dwarf woman gives birth to a child with the same congenital defect. A new treatment promises to make the child of normal size, but she and her husband refuse it; they very much want a dwarf child. Their reasons are…drawn from their experience as parents of an older child of normal size. From early infancy, their first child was too large for them to care for. They needed increasing help from larger adults, with the result that the child eventually became estranged from them and eager to leave the circus world in which they lived.¹⁰

In Ruddick's account, parents have rights to decide how to bring up their children. Such rights are not unqualified, however. Parents have obligations to provide “for the neccessaries of life.” These include facilitating their children's prospects of becoming self-supporting and leading independent lives. To Ruddick, the dwarf parents in his example fulfill the requirement of caring for their children's prospects, even though such prospects are, as Ruddick acknowledges, admittedly diminished.

Although protectionist arguments by Purdy, Blustein, and Schrag are less dramatic, they share a similar protectionist viewpoint of denying that children have any rights. Protectionists ignore the argument that for parents to retain rights for themselves may be misconstrued as a license to abuse infants and children.

The protectionist critique, in part, distorts the meaning of rights. Rights need not be understood primarily as expressions of unrestrained individual liberties, nor do people who favor rights show inadequate concern for the good of others. Rights may instead be interpreted as expressions of human respect, dignity, and maturity. Rights are a base line of decent behavior for people in regard to dealings with one another. One need not assert that rights are the summum bonum of all virtues; nor even that rights are at the tip of the iceberg of virtues. To some people who favor rights, rights are the guardians and boundary posts of virtues. In some views, rights are, on occasion, the capstone of virtues. Rights exhibit and also manifest some pivotal virtues, and therefore function as criteria for deciding what values to choose in bringing up children.

There are aspects to the protectionist-liberationist controversy that bear further consideration, such as the issue of whether the attribution of rights depends on evidence of developed capacities in human nature. The relation of rights and human nature bears further study, more than Purdy, Blustein, and Ruddick present us with, which is quite independent of their being for or against the attribution of rights to children. Liberationists exaggerate the good rights can do and place too few rational restraints on children's behavior. These writers, along with Cohen, (and in Matthews' case, stressing Piaget) ignore the singularly important contribution to human development made in John Dewey's educational writings. Dewey's writings provide a viable alternative to the either-or issue presented by protectionism and liberationism.

Here is a glaring example of what does and can happen to an innocent child, which shows also how protectionism and liberationism fail to account for children's interests:

There were four blackboards cutting off my classroom from the auditorium. Two were broken. Yet these four were all we had to cut us off from the rest of the hall. One day I saw that one was wobbling badly—tottering—and it looked to me as if it could easily tip over. Two days went by. On the third day, the reading teacher was getting ready to do a demonstration English lesson and she began to turn the blackboard, pushing it from one side with one hand. The entire unit tipped forward suddenly, then crashed downward toward the children sitting two yards off.

It slammed down with a violent impact upon a desk in the first row. A little girl named Charlene was sitting in that desk at that moment and she was not looking up because she had been busy at her work. The child at that desk missed getting her skull smashed in by about two and a half inches. The blackboard remained resting on her desk for a couple of seconds. The children seemed terrified by the noise and by the visible proof of how close it had come. You could see the little girl's head and you could see the blackboard's edge.

There it was. No doubt. No blur. There was the object. There, a few inches away the vulnerable head….¹¹

This example reveals that there is another issue besides protectionism and liberationism, and that is indifference to the well-being of small children. Gross abuses against children, such as the blackboard example, seriously undermine protectionist denials of children's rights (such as children's rights to life).

Some protectionist critics of children's rights ridicule a child's right to vote. But if one regards freedom as a matter of degree, 6-year-old children can vote for which color crayons to use in a class picture or which of several wholesome desserts to choose or which of several field trips to take. Children can develop into free beings by being free to choose in appropriate ways in relation to their readiness to handle tasks, projects, and responsibilities.

Protectionists like Laura Purdy, Jeffrey Blustein, Francis Schrag, William Ruddick, and even Joel Feinberg and David Archard (who are not hard-core protectionists) argue that children do not have the capacity or the required responsibility to handle rights and that children are not developmentally ready to have rights. One response to such arguments is to consider the importance of freedom not only for adults, but also for the development of children. If children have the right to develop, their development has a greater opportunity to succeed if they can make choices than if adults are the sole custodians of children's development: Freedom is crucial to both children and adults, but in the case of children there are qualifications.

INDIFFERENCE AND DEVELOPMENT

At the other end of the scale of indifference and carelessness is regard for development and care. As indifference generates abuse, respect and concern help to bring about development. The development may apply to a soccer team, a corporation, a school, a child, a community, or a nation. As development increases, indifference and abuse (including terrorism) decline. The converse holds as well; the rise of indifference implies the decline of development. So antithetical to an adequate theory of rights are the vices of indifference and abuse, that one could readily identify a function of rights as the minimization of abuse.

A dialectical or polar opposite to indifference is development. In the latter framework, children's rights are encouraged. These include rights to appropriate forms of freedom, care, nurture, and enlightenment. In any event, development functions as an antidote to indifference.

Some people have fixed positions either upholding or denying rights to children. In terms of informal logic, protectionists and liberationists alike are apt to commit the familiar either-or fallacy, taking a stand on one side or the other.¹² In later chapters, an effort is made to identify intermediate positions between these extremes. One of these in-between positions is indifference;¹³ another is development.¹⁴ The rationale for these added positions is twofold. Protectionism as a label implying protection is not entirely accurate, as it may easily mask an adult attitude of indifference to the interests and well-being of those whom they are allegedly protecting. Perhaps indifference is not so much another position as it is another side of the duplicitous coin of protectionism.

Moreover, protectionism has a good and wholesome aspect drawing from Plato's expression of concern for the subjects of a state and for the children of a family. In this venerable tradition, also to be found in some traditional cultures, the function of parents, whom Plato referred to as “guardians,” is to protect the young. These are people who know better than children what is best for them. Indifference, then, may be a stand-in for a hypocritical aspect of protectionism, where parents and teachers pretend to be protectors, but do not really care for their children.

Liberationists likewise propound an absurd extreme in ignoring developmental differences between adults and children. Some liberationist parents also hide behind a false label while they are actually indifferent to their children.

Children's rights are not all-or-none: some have stages. Some children's rights are rights-in-trust, which are (counterfactual) rights children would have if and when they were to reach young adulthood. Freedom, so central to rights, is also not all-or-none. In between protectionist and liberationist extremes is development, two aspects of which call for a distinction. The development of children's rights is social, psychological, economic, political, and comparable to the civil rights movement or the women's rights movement. Movements of this kind may develop, as these examples illustrate. This sense of development is indistinguishable from a child's right to develop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• REFERENCE BOOKS ON FAMILY ISSUES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Extended Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Reasons for Considering Children's Rights
• Part I: Toward a Justification of Adults' and Children's Rights
• Part II: The Development of Children's Rights
• Part III: The Rights Children Have
• Bibliography
• Index