The Philosophy of Childhood

Too many parents believe they own their children and can do anything they wish with them. Among Christian nationalist zealots this idea is extremely common and they make all kinds of unsubstantiated claims to justify their ownership of their children. The roots of their oftentimes belligerant attitude go all the way back to Greek philosophers. What of the rights of children? The following is published at the end of an encyclopedia entry in the Stanford Enclyclopedia of Philosophy. As the article points out the philosophy of childhood is a new academic field.

Aristotle regarded children as property of the father. On the ground that there can be no injustice “in the unqualified sense” towards what is one’s own, he reasoned that a father cannot be unjust to his own child. Until children reach their majority, according to Aristotle, they, like their father’s chattel, are, as it were, “part of himself,” and, since “no one chooses to hurt himself,” there can be “no injustice towards oneself” and hence no injustice committed by father toward a child. (Nicomachean Ethics 5.6, 1134b8-12) With our present-day awareness of child abuse, we may find these words hard to take seriously. Yet, in certain important respects, we have not moved all that far from the view Aristotle expresses.

Today even pets and farm animals have minimal legal protection against abuse. Children enjoy, at least in principle, much more extensive legal protection; and certainly enlightened people have become much more sensitive to the prevalence of child abuse, which they strongly condemn. Nevertheless, there are many respects in which, legally and morally, children are still treated today as the property of their parents. Thus, for example, a court may award the custody of a child whose mother has died to the child’s biological father, even though the child has never lived with him but has been taken care of by the mother’s life-in partner, whom she loves and regards as her father. In general, the “property” conception of children makes it hard to be sure that children will enjoy the protection against abuse they need, and the love and support they both need and deserve.

John Locke suggested that parents hold their children in custody from God, until their maturity. According to him, all parents are placed by the Law of Nature, under an obligation to preserve, nourish, and educate the Children they had begotten, not as their own Workmanship, but the Workmanship of their own maker, the Almighty, to who they were to be accountable for them. (Second Treatise of Government, sec. 56)

Locke added that the power “that Parents have over their Children, arises from that Duty which is incumbent on them to take care of their Offspring, during the imperfect state of Childhood.” (ibid., sec. 58)

The idea that one holds one’s children in custody from God might be a very attractive one in a society united by a common theology. But it seems to be of no general use in our own multi-cultural and largely secular society. On the other hand, if, like Plato, we thought of children as the property of the state, then parents could be thought of as having their children in custody for the state. But we are not, most of us, comfortable with that idea either. As it is, we can perhaps do little better than think of the society as having a legal and moral interest in protecting the welfare of its children – an interest that underlies and justifies legal protections against child abuse, as well as welfare measures that do something to promote their health and provide for their education. One might want to add, as I do, that a liberal society also has an interest in validating and protecting certain children’s rights. But how such a claim could be justified goes well beyond the scope of this paper.

Recent contributions to this discussion include Cohen (1980), which takes the position that children should have the same rights as adults even if, lacking the capacities needed to exercise a given right that adults have, they will need to borrow the capacities of others to exercise those rights. In contrast to the Cohen position, Purdy (1992) argues that affording equal rights to children would damage their own interests, as well as those of the society.

A useful introduction to the wide range of philosophical issues that concern children’s rights is to be found in Ladd (1996). See also Gross, 1977, Houlgate, 1980, Wringe, 1981, and Archard, 1993.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/childhood/

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