Abstract

‘Children’s rights’ connotes to many a plea for special assistance, a claim to sympathy and charity for a vulnerable population. They are positive rights, dependent on adults’ choosing to be generous, and thus inherently weaker than the negative liberties that respect for autonomous individuals entails. In addition, when thinking about children’s rights many imagine only particular aspects of upbringing that arise after children are embedded in a family, such as schooling, medical care and discipline. Children’s coming to be in one particular family rather than another in the first place is generally not thought to be something regarding which they have rights; the family setting is taken for granted, parenting by biological parents assumed as a natural, supra-legal condition. ¹