Young Childrens Rights
also in the series
Children Taken Seriously
In Theory, Policy and Practice
Edited by Jan Mason and Toby Fattore
Foreword by Mary John
ISBN 978 1 84310 250 2
Childrens Rights and Power
Charging Up for a New Century
Mary John
ISBN 978 1 85302 659 1(Paperback)
ISBN 978 1 85302 658 4(Hardback)
Childrens Rights in Education
Edited by Stuart Hart, Cynthia Price Cohen, Martha Farrell Erick Erickson and Mlfrid Grude Flekky
ISBN 978 1 85302 977 6
Traveller Children: A Voice for Themselves
Cathy Kiddle
ISBN 978 1 85302 684 3
Educational Citizenship and Independent Learning
Rhys Griffith
ISBN 978 1 85302 611 9
Children as Citizens: Education for Participation
Edited by Cathie Holden and Nick Clough
ISBN 978 1 85302 566 2
The Participation Rights of the Child: Rights and Responsibilities in Family and Society
Mlfrid Grude Flekky and Natalie Hevener Kaufman
ISBN 978 1 85302 490 0
A Charge Against Society: The Childs Right to Protection
Edited by Mary John
ISBN 978 1 85302 411 5
Children in Our Charge: The Childs Right to Resources
Edited by Mary John
ISBN 978 1 85302 369 9
Children in Charge: The Childs Right to a Fair Hearing
Edited by Mary John
ISBN 978 1 85302 368 2
CHILDREN IN CHARGE 13
Young Childrens Rights
Exploring Beliefs, Principles and Practice
Second Edition
Priscilla Alderson
Foreword by Mary John
Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia
The author and publishers are grateful to the proprietors below for their permission to use the following material: by Dorothy Judd, from Give Sorrow words: Working with a Dying Child, Second Edition (1995) by Dorothy Judd. Copyright John Wiley and Sons Limited. Reproduced with permission.
First edition published in 2000
This edition published in 2008
by Jessica Kingsley Publishers
73 Collier Street
London N1 9BE, UK
and
400 Market Street, Suite 400
Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA
www.jkp.com
Copyright Save the Children 2000, 2008
Foreword copyright Mary John 2008
Printed digitally since 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 610 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Applications for the copyright owners written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher.
Warning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Alderson, Priscilla.
Young children's rights : exploring beliefs, principles and practice / Priscilla Alderson. -- 2nd ed.
p. cm. -- (Children in charge series ; 13)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-84310-599-2 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Children's rights. 2. Children and adults. 3. Interpersonal communication. I. Title.
HQ789.A618 2008
305.230941--dc22
2007038887
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84310 599 2
eISBN 978 1 84642 774 9
To my mother, Dr Dorothy Clift, who since the 1940s
has set her six children an example of respect
for young children.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to: Save the Children, and especially Nicky Road, Sue Emerson and colleagues for planning the first edition of this book and commissioning me to write it; Mary John for inviting me to write this book for the Children in Charge series; and all the children and adults whose views and experiences have contributed to this book. I would like to express my gratitude to: my colleagues, especially Berry Mayall, Ginny Morrow, Liz Brooker and Helen Penn; our informative students from around the world at the Institute of Education, University of London, who are working on childrens rights, childhood and early childhood; other colleagues who have generously provided too many examples of active young children for me to be able to include all of them in this book; Rob Gayton at Save the Children; and Stephen Jones, Karin Knudsen and Maggie Pettifer at Jessica Kingsley Publishers. I thank Dorothy Judd for giving permission for the childs drawing to be reproduced in , and Professor Michael Freeman for permission to summarise his article Why it remains important to take childrens rights seriously (2007) on pages 1324.
I am responsible for any shortcomings in the text and for the views expressed herein. All royalties from the book will go to Save the Children.
Contents
Foreword
This is a welcome second edition of a book that attracted much attention when it first appeared in the Children in Charge series in 2000. Much has happened in the intervening seven years, almost too much to grasp. Children remain a concern of political parties bent on tackling a broken society seen by some, and hyped by the media, as out of control. Childhood appears to have become a lucrative field for the journalist, the neo-libertarian pundit, a focus for commercial exploitation and various other vested interests. A free-for-all was not what was meant by childrens rights and participation but to the extent we believe what we read in the papers it has raised questions about when did it all start to go wrong? Rights have had a bad press. It is refreshing in the midst of this to hear once more the calm sane voice of a distinguished practitioner and researcher in the field, Priscilla Alderson.
The Children in Charge series in its accumulating volumes has brought together accounts of activities taking place throughout the world in the realisation of the aims of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the publisher had appreciated early how significant work in this area would be. The series was named Children in Charge quite deliberately to emphasise the stance adopted throughout. So far it has looked in detail at elements of the processes by which children claim and exercise their rights and are facilitated in doing so in a variety of contexts. This was explored in an interdisciplinary, multicultural way by the papers in the first three volumes about this relatively new field which sprang from the World Conference held at Exeter University in 1992. This was the first international conference in which young people were crucially involved.
In the initial volumes the implications of the United Nations Convention in practical, theoretical and research terms were teased out, aided by the arguments, participation and inside knowledge of our Young Peoples Evaluation Panel. Those volumes (Children in Charge, Children in Our Charge, A Charge Against Society