Youth and Human Rights Discussion
Host Mike Males

Participant
1. We must learn to be tolerant of differences without throwing away many of the virtues that were embedded in my early years.

2. I recognize the importance of the emphasis that Dick and others place in treating children more like adults -- but hope that in doing so we will also recognize that a person of 15 is quite different from one of 25. I agree with your first point. We need to avoid the attempt to make youth just like adults. We also need to shed any nostalgia for childhood. Somewhere in the middle we will find authentic youth culture, personality and identity. There is much that is noble and good about children, and to loose that by turning them into adults would be a tragedy. However adult rights I think doesn't necessitate adult actions or personality. I think young people need the same rights, but should be expected to use them in ways of their own making.

As for your second point, I agree with the principle, but not the example. Knowing many people who are 15 and 25 I can say there isn't a significant difference between people at these ages. However if you compared 20-year-olds to 10- year-olds I would expect there to be differences (though I can't say I know very many 10-year-olds, so I'm speaking from my own biases). We can't expect a 4- year-old to hold down a steady job, pay bills, and kick back with a few cans of beer after work. So how we handle the rights of children will be a difficult challenge. Unfortunately I don't have a clear answer for this yet.

Some have suggested that parents should exercise the rights of their young children on their behalf. Or change the duty of parents to prepare their children to accept full rights as soon as they are able and to grant individual rights as soon as they are appropriate. This is an interesting approach, but parents, as Richard noted, are often the least able to respect the rights and views of their children.

Another thought is that children themselves must declare a willingness to use and exercise their rights. It is likely young children will have no desire to use adult rights, being concerned with other aspects of life (learning to walk, talk, etc) so even though they have full rights they will be unable to take advantage of them until their older. However if one out of a million 5 year olds wants to drive a car for example, and can pass a driving test to prove himself to be a safe driver, then there is no reason for not granting the license.

The quick answer is that of course we need to recognize real differences in capability between children and adults. This means we need to think of different ways in which their rights can be used and granted. Like Richard said, even senile or disabled adults have rights. It is also important I feel to focus on negative rights, not positive rights. An adult with no legs still has the right to drive, but figuring out how is his own business. Likewise with children.

Participant
Mike, I'm curious as to what other information exists, in more or less compact and accessible form, concerning rights of children in the rest of the world. Are all other countries (setting Europe aside for the moment) that far ahead of us in this regard? Are there useful indices, other than the UNICEF State of the World's Children reports, on the relative performance of all countries? What do you think of it as a source, by the way?

Participant
It’s not equality at the behavior level I am looking for—it’s that more subtle thing of giving each person—including all children—their due respect and interest. The older I get the more I am amazed by the at moments brilliance, aesthetic, and ethical judgments of children. And of course their (at times) egocentric over or under concern. Children are extraordinary with language, both conserving it ("in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue..." not a word different from the way I heard it 60 years ago)—and creative, as Chomsky speculates, children through use of their innate sense create sentences never heard before, that are "correct' but new and heard by adults become part of the adult repertoire). And Children’s art: Just try copying what a child does, and you will become impressed, especially if you do yourself make "adult" paintings.

Children are capable of extraordinarily helpful conversations about their parents, about animals, about nature. All children are capable of some kind of peer to peer conversation with us. The child is not the same as an adult, but also is not just "less". In Bali, the wonderful hand dance of young girls is to recapture the movements of the hand of the very young child, when they are still gods and not yet socialized to being humans. As Colwyn Tevarthan of Edinburgh says, "Children as they grow older replace capacity with habit."

It’s that sense of dealing with the fully human, the completely significant other, that I would like our civilization to be committed to.

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