Abstract
Nick Lee considers that many adults oppose children's rights because they fear that respect for rights separates the child from others and particularly from adults’ ‘possession’ of children. Lee believes that society associates separation with the highest status individuals and achievements, but also with undermining love and care for children. He advocates the concept of temporary, partial and, he hopes, the more acceptable form of ‘separability’, which he sees as compatible with both rights and love.
The book begins with defining four instrumental ways in which adults value and possess children: as innocent dependents, parental investments, bearers of heritage and sites of investment. Lee selects examples from prominent theorists, many of whom were boys in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, to show how they explicitly or implicitly addressed separation: Charles Taylor on the historical transfer from feudal concepts of social honour to modern concepts of individual dignity; Freud on how anarchic, savage and infantile tribes gradually evolved into controlled, civilized and independent individuals; Piaget's tracing of the child's development from egocentrism, which confuses self with others and attributes magical powers to them, towards independent scientific reasoning; Berstein's language codes; Beck's and Marx's histories of industry; Kohlberg's stages of moral development (and thereby individual separation) and Gilligan's ethics of justice and of care; Winnicott's transitional object theory; Vygotsky on private speech; Elias on medieval manners; Deleuze and Guattari on evolutionary and social de-territorialization. Lee relates these texts to child development, and separation. For example, he illustrates Bernstein's ‘restricted code’ with a parent telling a child to do something, and when the child asks ‘why?’ the parent more or less says, ‘because I say so, shut up!’ (p. 47). Lee maintains that this assumes shared meanings and views and mutual trust, whereas the formal language code when the adult explains the reason for the command signals individual private meaning, difference, separateness and lack of trust.
Lee summarises critiques of developmental theories into two kinds. First, according to anti-developmental psychology, developmental theories mistake social and political hierarchies of power, wealth and age for natural/biological hierarchies and thereby collude with them in the ‘fiction’ that adults and children are different and separate, thereby concealing their similarities. Second, Lee considers that sociologists of childhood deny the developmental concept of the universal child averring that it ignores diverse cultural and individual differences and therefore the essential separateness of every child. Lee aims to reassure adults that separation and attachment, adult possession of children and children's own self-possession, care of children and respect for their rights can peacefully overlap through separability.
This a fascinating and informative book, it is challenging and raises many controversial points. The philosophical discussions tend to be abstract and general, illustrated with vignettes and hypothetical or research cases. The only ‘real child’ mentioned is Lal Jamilla, whose ‘honour killing’ is said to illustrate the value of children as cultural inheritors. Childhood is often implicitly a vague category in which everyone up to age 18 shares the dependence of infants. If examples from recent empirical research about young children's early social and moral competencies had been included, they could throw a different light on the accounts, for example, of Kohlberg's prolonged stages of moral development, the implication from Elias’ work that all childhood involves incontinence and uncivilised medieval manners, or the concentration on Winnicot's important transitional object theory, which is rather detached from the whole context of babies’ lives. The concept of the ‘becoming-person’ (around p. 148) raises unresolved questions about how babies can ‘begin’ to think, communicate and act without actually doing so, and therefore without already ‘being’ persons as well as becoming and changing in the ways that people do throughout life.
Lee takes ‘belonging’ (etymological root in ‘love’) to mean possession (etymological root in ‘power’). He assumes without question that belonging means that adults do and should ‘possess’ children, and that the only alternative is children's own ‘self-possession’. The book raises undiscussed questions. Do people think of ‘being’ or ‘doing’ their self rather than owning it? Does togetherness have to mean uniformity, and does difference have to mean separation? Does not intimacy, for example, relish the tensions of difference? What can love between children, and between adults, and children's love for adults (none of these are mentioned in the book) tell us about adult's love for children? Are these various kinds of love so very different? And if they had been considered, might parental love have been less conceptualised as possession that views children as property? If belonging has to take this form, are parents as much belonging to and ‘possessed’ by their children as children to their parents? Birth, weaning, walking, nursery, child friendships and school all involve forms of separation from parents, who tend to welcome these partly shared experiences as well as regretting the passing of earlier closeness. Parents of disabled children grieve if they cannot transfer on to each new partial separation.
Lee's aims to promote respect for children's rights by allaying adults’ separation anxieties and by advocating ‘separability’. He seems concerned with parents’ fear of loss of proximity with their children, rather than with parents’ possibly greater anxieties about loss of control and power over children. Concerns over separation may be gendered and Gilligan, the only women whose work Lee reviews in detail, offers relevant research, although this is not mentioned by Lee. Gilligan and colleagues interviewed men and women about pictures of pairs of people and found that the closer the pair, such as trapeze artists holding each other's life in their hands, the more women found trust in intimacy and men found fear and danger. Men tended to find safety in distance and women to associate it with danger. This may partly explain why Lee says so little about intimacy between adults and children, and how intimacy can support mutual interdependent respect for rights – protecting and providing for one another, besides participating (the third kind of child rights) literally taking part and sharing and communicating, the opposite of the separation or separability that Lee assumes is the essential grounds for rights. Further distancing effects in the book are the way children appear through the quite dense lens of theoretical research, some of which was not originally concerned with children at all, and through the questionable lens of developmental psychology. The UN Convention's preamble on reconciling rights and love, children's early agency and their value as ends in themselves and more than means towards adults’ ends are not really addressed. This complicates the purpose of a book intended to advance children's rights.