David
Archard’s Children: Rights and Childhood is an exhaustive and
meticulously comprehensive examination of children’s rights from both a moral
and a legal perspective. Much has been written on the subject of children and
how they are and ought to be treated, and Archard carefully examines the work
of other thinkers, from 18th century philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau,
to contemporary scholars, including feminists and child liberationists, with
critical fair-mindedness.

The question of children’s
rights is enormously complicated. The issue of human rights for adults is not
without controversy, of course, but it is a paradox of childhood that as
children mature and grow older, the matter of their rights grows only more
complicated. Children, even older children, are not simply small adults
(although some child liberationists claim that they are). While reasonable
people would find it uncontroversial that infants neither have nor need the right
to vote, or to freely marry, for example, there is much room for debate about
the age at which a teenager should acquire such rights. To address such issues,
any complete account of children’s rights must look at the very concept of
childhood, how childhood and children are defined, the place children occupy
within society and the family, and the moral status of children.

Equally difficult are
questions about the rights of parents with respect to their children. There is
a great deal of cultural variance when it comes to standards of child-rearing,
definitions of child abuse and exploitation, and so on. Archard rightly
challenges the assumption that there is a general right to have children, and
argues that a presumptive right to rear children is contingent on parental
willingness and ability to ensure the "minimally decent upbringing"
to which children have a right. Socio-economic structures that support and
enforce vast inequalities of resources present a genuine challenge to the
western, liberal ideal of parenting, and to Archard’s "minimally
decent" standard. What would count as minimally decent (or at least, the
best possible) in the most impoverished Third World country, for example, would
fall far below the threshold of decency in more affluent Western societies.
Socio-economic status can vary greatly within societies, with some children
receiving more and better resources, while others live in abject poverty that
results in long-term, perhaps lifelong disadvantages. Tackling such problems,
Archard argues, requires more than agreeing on what rights children have and
when they have them; it "requires a major egalitarian programme of social
and economic reform" for which, Archard is the first to acknowledge, there
is little political support.

Archard argues for what he
calls "a modest collectivism" in the values that determine our
thinking about childhood. He calls for "a commitment to democratic,
egalitarian and collectivist values in the rearing of children" along with
"a significant assumption of collective responsibility for childcare, a
‘diffusion of parenting’, a collective valuation of children and a significant
extension of children’s rights." By a ‘diffusion of parenting’ Archard
means, essentially, a more collective attitude towards the rearing of children,
something along the lines of "it takes a village." Such a proposal
would conflict with the individualistic attitude towards parenting and family
that prevails in many liberal western countries, but would accord with the way
much of the rest of the world approaches it, with a more expansive view of what
constitutes a family or familial community. The upshot of Archard’s modest
collectivism would be "a significant abridgment of liberal rights to
parental privacy and autonomy," but with significant benefits, he claims,
in the form of a society that would be better, overall, for children. In
particular, Archard notes, empowering children within a more open scheme of
childrearing could greatly reduce the forms of child abuse that flourish in
secrecy, while a more egalitarian society would "reduce the ‘collective
abuse’ of children who are victims of poor circumstances and the predisposing
social causes of much physical abuse."

It is a shortcoming of
Archard’s book that he has a problematic tendency to make inflammatory and
inaccurate statements about adoption. He repeatedly refers to the
"buying" of adopted children by affluent parents. Such statements are
not only deeply offensive to adopted children and their families, they also
stigmatize adoption, and reinforce harmful stereotypes about adoptive families
being less authentic than biologically-related families. While
"buying" children may be commonplace in Archard’s native U.K.
(although, being acquainted with adoptive families there, I rather doubt it),
in the United States, people who seek to adopt either domestically or abroad
are extensively reviewed by the social services and legal systems before
children are legally placed in their care. This is not to claim that all
adoptive parents are perfect, or that adopted children are never harmed or
abused. It is only to refute the not uncommon belief that adopted children are
purchased by those who can use money and influence to circumvent the
considerable safeguards in place to ensure that orphans and other wards of the
state are protected and provided with suitable homes.

Archard
reasonably favors the screening of adoptive parents as a means of protecting
vulnerable children. Further, he draws an important distinction between
biological parenthood and moral parenthood, and makes the case that it is only
moral parenthood, that is, the assumption of the duty to give children a decent
upbringing, that correlates with a parental right to rear children. In other
words, the presumptive right to rear a child does not derive from the brute
fact of a biological relationship. Archard also argues that "society
should encourage a diversity of familial forms," a position that can
hardly countenance looking askance at less traditional methods of building families.
Few would argue that the purchase of a child, as if it were fungible property,
could support even a presumptive right to rear that child, but if Archard does
not mean to suggest that adoptive parents have no right to raise adopted
children, his comments are doubly unfortunate because they stigmatize adopted
children while serving no purpose in his otherwise intriguing thesis.

While there is undoubtedly a
lack of political will to enact the kinds of reforms Archard advocates, his
provocative thesis ought to be considered by those who work with and on behalf
of children because it questions some of the most basic assumptions about
children, childhood, and the way we think about children’s rights. Archard’s
book is thoughtful and well-reasoned, even if his conclusions are bound to be
controversial. Children: Rights and Childhood is overall a fine basic
text, and a worthwhile introduction to the complex issue of children’s rights.

© 2005 L. Syd M Johnson

L. Syd
M Johnson, M.A., is a bioethicist and Ph.D. candidate at SUNY Albany, currently
working on a dissertation exploring the implications for reproductive choices
of the Non-Identity Problem and new genetic technologies.

Categories: Philosophical, Ethics