An interview with Jonathan Todres and Ursula Kilkelly about their edited collection, Children's Rights and Children's Development: An Integrated Approach

Q: What is this edited collection about?

Children’s rights and child development frameworks are both recognized as critical to understanding children’s lived experiences, advancing child wellbeing, and implementing the rights of all children. However, research in the two fields has proceeded largely on separate tracks. This edited volume aims to forge a more integrated approach to children’s rights and child development, with a view to informing and advancing research, law, and policy affecting children.

With contributions from leading scholars in children’s rights and child development, the book provides an in-depth examination of the fundamental stages in childhood development—early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. It goes beyond the often very general language in law and policies that considers children as a homogenous group. The book delineates how the rights of young people can be understood at each stage of development and how this can, and should, inform law and policy on children’s rights.

Q: What made you initiate this volume?

[A fuller excerpt is available on the NYU Press website]

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely accepted human rights treaty in history, defines a child as every human being below the age of eighteen years (Article 1). Despite the widespread accep­tance of this definition, it is equally clear that “children” by definition are not a homogeneous group; they experience diverse cultures and back­grounds and have unique lived experiences for a whole range of complex reasons. Children are also distinguished by their age and stage of devel­opment, as their capacity to exercise their rights evolves throughout childhood. It is readily apparent, for instance, that babies have very dif­ferent needs and interests from adolescents. Moreover, even young and older children can be distinguished from one another in relation to their maturity, how they exercise their rights, and the contexts in which they seek to do so. Yet, while there have important advances in law and policy since the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989, acknowledging how children differ from adults, there has been significantly less progress in law and policy domains with regard to rec­ognizing the diversity and developmental nature of childhood.

The CRC makes no distinction between children of different ages and stages of development, recognizing all children as rights holders and equally worthy of dignity and respect. This approach is consistent with the foundational concept of human rights that rights are inherent in all in­dividuals. At the same time, reading through the CRC, it is clear that cer­tain provisions will resonate more clearly with children of particular stages of development. For instance, the right to play may apply more commonly to younger children, while the provisions relating to children in conflict with the law typically apply to older children. While there is merit in the CRC’s uniform approach—where children’s rights appear to apply equally to all children at all stages of development—this approach could be said to be unhelpful insofar as it ignores the relevance of children’s development to the exercise of their rights. Certainly, as attention shifts more and more to the implementation of the CRC and children’s rights more generally, a greater granularity in the understanding of children’s development is necessary to achieve full implementation of children’s rights.

Although developmental differences are acknowledged in the chil­dren’s rights literature, they are rarely engaged with in any depth. For example, scholars frequently note that provisions like Article 12 of the CRC—which affirms children’s right to be heard on matters that affect them—apply to all children, but relatively few focus on its application to young children. The literature rarely addresses what participation rights mean in the specific contexts of early childhood or middle child­hood, with little analysis, for example, of how this and other provisions of the CRC might differ in application to a five-year-old compared with a fifteen-year-old. Even less consideration is given to what steps duty bearers—notably governments—should take to ensure the implemen­tation of children’s rights law in developmentally appropriate ways for children of all ages. At the same time, there is little engagement with children’s rights in the developmental literature, and few scholars in the field of child development engage with or draw on rights analysis in their work. Despite the common concern for children’s lives, their care, education, and well-being, these two fields correspond infrequently.

And yet, there would appear to be much to be gained in the under­standing of children’s rights to consider them through a developmental lens and vice versa. In particular, deeper engagement with the stages of childhood can help to further unpack what rights mean, and how they apply, to children of various ages and stages of development. At the same time, applying the rights perspective to child development can also extend the reach of this field, connecting it to the international legal framework with greater effect and channeling development science findings to law and policy domains. More generally, encouraging dialogue across disciplines and approaches has genuine potential to advance children’s rights, knowing that with greater awareness comes greater understanding and, ultimately, greater implementation of children’s rights. At the basis of this edited col­lection, therefore, is the belief that intentionally connecting children’s rights and child development can yield benefits for both fields, leading to their mutual advancement. More importantly, it is our view that bringing the two fields together in dialogue can help to develop law, policies, and programs that better support the rights and healthy development of all children.

….

[W]e see this volume as an invitation to scholars and professionals in both fields to take up the questions raised here and build on our ambitions to bring the two fields together.

In undertaking the first integrated, thematic analysis of children’s rights and child development, we experienced inevitable, unanticipated challenges and discoveries especially as we sought to forge a more nu­anced, developmentally responsive approach to the implementation of children’s rights law. In this respect, the chapters in this volume re­vealed some challenges for children’s rights law and for law more gener­ally when viewed from a child development lens. For instance, while evidence-based research on child development emphasizes precision and caution in expressing findings, law necessarily speaks in broader, often general terms. For example, law frequently uses the term “chil­dren” on a specific issue, even though the vast majority of the individu­als affected might be infants, toddlers, or even adolescents. While the generality of the language used is important to ensure that less typical cases are not excluded from protection from various laws, this lack of precision, from a child development perspective, nonetheless increases the challenge of developing law and policy on children’s rights that is specific to children’s stage of development. At the same time, and con­versely, the child development literature also recognizes that develop­ment and maturation occur differently in different children, suggesting that we must provide flexibility for individualized trajectories in chil­dren’s development. Yet that flexibility sometimes pushes up against law’s need for bright-line rules, to ensure greater clarity ex ante.