Felton Earls - Voice, Choice, and Action

How can we adults claim to see our world clearly and completely without incorporating the perspectives of its youngest inhabitants, its children? Believe it or not, children can contribute insights and solutions to profoundly difficult circumstances confronting their communities. The question is not whether they have something to say but whether todays children will be encouraged and expected to voice their opinions, make informed decisions, and coordinate their chosen actions. What will we adultsparents, neighbors, educators, scholars, and leadersdo to engage them?

This book draws on childhood development science, intensive fieldwork, and real-world social action to show how to improve society by ensuring that children become respected participants in the public discourse. Our definition of children follows that of UNICEF, as the international standard: every human being below the age of eighteen years. In these pages, we explore how even very young people can be introduced to the idea of human rights and citizenship and provided with the tools to deliberate among themselves. Voice, Choice, and Action collects decades of research into one definitive text to demonstrate that children have the awareness and competence to claim citizenship roles in democratic society.

We show children doing just thiswhether growing up in a Chicago neighborhood riddled by violence, surviving homeless on the streets of Brazil, or facing the loss of parents to HIV in Tanzania. In Chicago, children initiated a probing dialogue to question the violence threatening their neighborhoods. In Brazil, children formed their own political movement to help forge a child rights statute in the countrys new constitution that changed the identity of children from that of lesser minors to that of empowered rightsholders. These successes helped to inform a fully developed Young Citizens program that was rigorously evaluated in Tanzania. There, young citizens started a public health movement in their local communities that led to a dramatic increase in voluntary testing for HIV, a critical intervention in a devastating national crisis.

To be sure, equipping a child to participate in public discourse begins in infancy. In Romania, we encountered abandoned infants living in state institutions by the thousands, denied the most basic social contact required to become fully human, let alone citizens. Yet nurture alone is not sufficient to give children voice, prepare them to make choices, and embolden them to take action. This is not charity. Rather, we need processes for discovering childrens social, communicative, and rational capabilities and supporting them in being recognized and respected as increasingly competent deliberative citizens.

The Young Citizens program described in these pages offers possibilitiesand does so at a vital moment in history. Across the globe, birth rates are dropping, in many places quite rapidly. As the worlds population ages, societies will depend ever more upon the open minds and boundless energy of children.

Today, in America, children are leading a national effort to tackle the crisis of gun violence. Around the world, children are coming together to awaken their communities and nations to the global health and ecological threat of climate change. Freshly inspired by their actions, we synthesize here the results of our long careers work. Framed in social theory, guided by scientific inquiry, and grounded in proven participatory practices, may innovations like the Young Citizens program help to bring more children into democratic deliberations, and to keep our democracies vibrant.