Lister Childhoodandcitizenship

7/28/2019 Lister Childhoodandcitizenship

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CHILDREN AND CITIZENSHIPRuth Lister

Professor of Social PolicyUniversity of Loughborough

Paper presented at a Glasgow Centre for the Child & Society seminar,3 November 2005.

Introduction

Delighted to have the opportunity to give this paper at the centre. Mypaper is about childrens citizenship in the particular cultural context of theUK, though as Kay Tindall has reminded me, even within that contextsome very real differences exist between Scotland and England and

Wales, not all of which I may have grasped!

Ive only recently started to think seriously about childrens relationship tocitizenship, having focused in my work on gendered citizenship, and thispaper represents fairly preliminary thoughts rather than a finishedstatement. Therefore will v much welcome your feedback, given yourexpertise in the area of childhood.

My interest in childrens relationship to citizenship is partly in response tothe dominant political construction of the child as citizen-worker of thefuture, which is most marked in the New Labour discourse around

children, which Ive critiqued. (I note in contrast that part of the ScottishExecutives vision for children is that they should be responsible citizens dk how far that reflects a genuinely different construction of childrenscitizenship to that of New Labour; and of course responsibility a commontheme)

But also my interest has been prompted by some criticisms of my ownwork. One was in response to a chapter based on research, withcolleagues, into young peoples citizenship a longitudinal, qualitativestudy covering young people who were aged 16-25 over the 3 year periodof the research. We called the study transitions to citizenship. I used

T.H. Marshalls notion of children and young people as citizens in themaking (1950: 25) contrasting it with New Labours construction of youngpeople as deficient citizens (Lister et al., 2005).

In a postscript to the chapter, Tom Burke, a 19-year-old student, savagedus as myth destroyers to myth makers in one short and degradingsentence. He argued that the notion of citizens in the making is just asfundamentally flawed as that of deficient citizens. It perpetuates apassive view of young people who are idly waiting for citizenship, and ifthey are lucky, it will be bestowed upon them by others. It does not give

young people their true credit as social actors in their own right nor does itrecognise the contribution that young people are making to our society


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todayI am not a citizen in the making. I am a citizen today. (Burke,2005: 53) While I dont agree that the notion of citizens in the makingcarries all those connotations, or at least that was not what was intended,the criticism did give me pause for thought.

Another comment on my work which prompted me to reflect was in Hilland Tisdalls Children & Societywhich I only read recently. They cite froma CPAG pamphlet I wrote back in 1990, stating that I did not have aproblem with childrens dependency, because children had a restrictedform of citizenship (1997: 37).

They go on to ask some fundamental questions, notably whether theconcepts of childhood and citizenship are compatible. This questionthey point out depends just as much on how citizenship is defined as itdoes on childhoods definition. Certainly, a definition of citizenship couldbe made that would definitely include childrenBut would such a definition

of citizenship retain the basic building blocks of the concept? (ibid: 38).This is the question to which the paper now turns by unpacking thedifferent elements of citizenship, after some general reflections on theissue. It will then consider whether there are any lessons to be learnedfrom the feminist critique of citizenship.

General reflections

I want to start by briefly considering how childrens relationship tocitizenship has been represented in general terms in the literature. This ispossibly a caricature. But it is possible to identify two extremes in the

literature. On the one hand is the citizenship literature. This has onlyrecently and very patchily started to address what citizenship means forchildren in the here and now. More typically it has either tended to ignorechildren altogether, implicitly equating citizenship with adulthood, or it hasportrayed children as citizens of the future, citizens-in-waiting (Cutler andFrost, p8) or at best citizens in the making in Marshalls phrase. Otherterms used have been learner citizens (Arnot and Dillabough, 2000) andapprentice citizens (Wyness et al., 2004: 82).

At the other extreme, there is one strand in the childhood literature, whichchallenges this by simply asserting that children are citizens. So, for

example, a report from the Carnegie Young People Initiative, which coverschildren and young people aged 10 and above, claims they are citizensand should be treated as such (Cutler and Frost, 2001: 2).

Of course, there is a wide space between these two extremes, whichincreasingly is being addressed by some of the literature, particularly thechildhood literature. The childhood literature is also important because ourunderstanding of childrens relationship to citizenship will be rooted in howwe see children. The contemporary sociology of childhoods constructionof children as social actors with agency and varying degrees ofcompetence clearly opens up possibilities for the recognition of children as

active citizens in a way that a construction of them as passive objects ofadult policies and practices did not (Stasiulis). Beings are more easily


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seen as active citizens in the here and now than are becomings whosecitizenship is seen as a potential and a status to be achieved in the future.

Popular and political constructions in the UK often reflect ambivalence inpopular attitudes towards children. A tendency to sentimentalise and

idealise children (and to emphasise their need for care and protection) hasexisted alongside reluctance to accommodate their presence in the adultworld and increasingly an element of hostility and fear, as reflected in therecent demonisation by the media of feral children (leading to increasedemphasis on their need for control). Here childrens agency is seen as anegative rather than a positive.

So-called feral children are typically the children of the poor. This actsas a reminder that just as adults relationship to citizenship is mediated bysocial divisions, such as class, gender, race, and disability, so is that ofchildren. Children living in poverty face particular obstacles to citizenship.

Age is especially significant for childrens citizenship not just because itserves to define the category but also, because of its relationship tocapacity within the category children. Jeremy Roche points to thedistinction, increasingly drawn in the childhood literature, between theyounger child and the young person. The arguments for the increasedparticipation of children in decision-making affecting their lives are bothpractically and theoretically more compelling the older the child is heconcludes (1999: 483).

A rather different perspective on age can be found in the JRF report onYoung Childrens Citizenship, which focused on under-12-year-olds and inparticular those aged under seven, including babies. In their contribution,Marchant and Kirby are critical of the way this group is rendered invisibleas citizens and of the assumption that it is only older children who canparticipate as citizens although I am not convinced by the inclusion ofbabies with regard to citizenship capacity as such. In her introduction,Bren Neale points out that the inclusion of older children and young peopleis relatively straightforward. They are expected to assume adult modesof behaving and communicating, so that it requires little change on thepart of adults. Citizenship for young children, on the other hand she

argues requires some effort on the part of adults to accommodatechildrens varied modes of doing, saying and being (2004: 15).

A recent UNICEF report on The Evolving Capacities of the ChildbyGerison Lansdown provides a compass to help navigate the difficultquestion of age and capacity. It explores the meaning of Article 5 of theUN Convention on the Rights of the Child, focusing on evolving capacityrather than age in relation to the balance between participatory andprotection rights. While capacities evolve with age, in practice the actualages at which a child acquires competencies vary according to her lifeexperiences and social and cultural environment on the one hand and the

nature of the competencies and the situations in which they are required tobe exercised on the other. At every stage, the report argues, regard must


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be had to childrens right to respect for their capacities (p. 15) and tochildrens agency. In practice, adults consistently underestimatechildrens capacities (pp30-1), raising questions about theirabilitytoassess them (Tisdall et al., 2003). Ill come back to the specific questionof citizenship capacity later.

So, having considered childrens relationship to citizenship in very generalterms, the paper now unpacks the different elements of citizenshipbecause in its substantive form, it is not a unitary phenomenon. ElizabethCohen has, rightly, criticised accounts of childrens citizenship, which treatone element of citizenship as if it were the whole. It may be that the fitbetween children and citizenship is closer for some elements than others.

Unpacking childrens citizenshipMembership

At one level, childrens claim to citizenship lies in their membership of the

citizenship community. Their relationship to that community may bedifferent from that of adults but that does not necessarily affect the claim tocitizenship status.

Roche proposes that the demand that children be included in citizenshipis simply a request that children be seen as members of society too, with alegitimate and valuable voice and perspective (1999: 479). He laterequates being counted as a member of the community with participation(ibid: 484). He cites Martha Minows observation that including childrenas participants alters their stance in the community, from things or

outsiders to members. This points to something of a conundrum: childrencan make their claim to be members of the citizen-community throughactive participation in it; but in order to be able to participate they first needto be accepted as members of the citizen-community. And thatacceptance is, in practice, partly contingent on children demonstratingtheir capacity to be participatory citizens.

Evaluations of initiatives that have enabled children and young people toparticipate, as well as research into childrens participation in social actiongroups, testify to how they strengthen young peoples sense of belongingto the community as well as equipping them with the skills and capacities

required for effective citizenship (Cutler and Frost, 2001: 6).

This all suggests that, while at one level all children are members of thecommunity and therefore have the status of citizens in a thin sense,recognition of children as citizens in the thicker sense of activemembership requires facilitating their participation as political and socialactors. This is about more than just participation in individual decisionsabout ones own life made by parents and professionals but opens upparticipation in wider collective decision-making. Ben-Arieh and Boyer,who discuss child participation at both levels, explicitly equate it with childcitizenship and assert that its denial is unacceptable from the perspective

of childrens well-being and current and future citizenship (2005: 51). This


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brings us to the question of whether participation constitutes a right ofcitizenship for children.

Rights

Childrens right to express an opinion and to have that opinion taken into

account in any matter or procedure affecting the child is enshrined inArticle 12 of the UN Convention. In the UK, such a right is contained invarious pieces of childrens legislation. There is not, though, a wider rightto participation; and the same is, of course, true of adults. But, as theCarnegie report points out, participatory rights are of particular significancefor children and young people aged under 18 who do not have the vote.This is even more the case in the context of social exclusion, wherechildrens voices (as well as adults) are even less likely to be heard, asHill, Tisdall and colleagues have pointed out.

It is the lack of the vote that perhaps raises the biggest question mark over

the status of childrens citizenship. The right to vote in national elections iswhat divides denizens (i.e. people with a legal and permanent residencestatus) from citizens, since denizens in theory normally enjoy full socialand civil rights. It could be argued that without the vote a person is not afull citizen. As against that, the vote does not seem to figure veryprominently in public understandings of citizenship. Moreover, given lowturnout in recent elections, particularly among young people, participationin informal politics, social action or public decision-making that affects theirlives may constitute a more important signifier of effective citizenship formany people. That is not, however, a reason for rejecting current

demands for extension of the right to the vote down to age

16. With the advent of citizenship education and the spread ofparticipatory initiatives, the case for this has arguably been strengthened.

The rights contained in the UN Convention constitute human rightsarticulated specifically in relation to children. As such they representethical or moral rights rather than directly legally enforceable citizenshiprights (unless incorporated into national law, which for the most part theyare not in the UK). Nevertheless they provide what Michael Freeman callsan important advocacy tool, a weapon to use in battles to secure

recognition (2005: 66) and as such they offer a resource for citizenshipalthough one which is jeopardised by poverty and social exclusion.

Freeman uses education as an example of a right contained in theConvention, which is not translated into a right as such in the UK, althoughI understand children do now have a right to education in Scotland. InEngland and Wales at least, it is parental not child choice, which is agoverning principle of education policy. Marshall did, in fact, write ofeducation as a genuine social right of citizenship but he argued thatfundamentally it should be regarded, not as the right of the child to go toschool, but as the right of the adult citizen to have been educated (p. 25).

Interestingly, the right to have access to free education for children came


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top of the list of rights people thought they possess in the Home OfficeCitizenship Survey.

The main social citizenship right to carry legally enforceable entitlements issocial security, including child benefit. It is a right that children receive

only by proxy through their parent(s), to use Jones and Wallaces phrase,and it is a right which, they observe, has become increasingly age-structured (1992: 49). Jones and Wallace also point to how childrenacquire different citizenship rights (civil, political and social) at differentages before, at and after the age of majority. This reflects how in thewords of the UNICEF report, age is the key determinant in the acquisitionof formal rights in many societies even though this inflexible model doesnot reflect childrens actual and differing capacities (pp. 49-50).

With regard to civil rights, Cohen suggests that many of the classical civilrights are typically regarded as irrelevant or inappropriate to the

circumstances of childhood (2005: 224); children are excluded almostwholesale from the freedoms that compose the oldest category of rightsassociated with citizenship (ibid). Childrens disqualification from adultcitizenship rights is justified on grounds of their need for protection andtheir dependence on adults. Few would question that some distinction isvalid on those grounds. That does not mean, though, that the currentconfiguration of their rights is necessarily logical or appropriate from thepoint of view of the acquisition of full citizenship status, particularly inrelation to what has been called todays responsibilized child.Interestingly, in our study the young people found it much harder to

articulate their rights as citizens than they did their responsibilities.

Responsibilities

There are two overlapping aspects to childrens responsibilities as citizens:those that are imposed and/or encouraged by the state and those thatchildren exercise of their own accord.

A key responsibility of citizenship is to obey the law (deemed the mostimportant in the Home Office Citizenship Survey). The effective age ofcriminal responsibility is now only 10 in E&W and 8 in Scotland, indefiance of the recommendations of the UN Committee on the Rights of

the Child. Children are a prime target of anti-social behaviour orders (witheven BASBOs now being mooted for children under the age of criminalresponsibility) and they can now be subject to special child curfews.There has also been talk of making some of the social rights of parentsconditional on the behaviour of their children.

However, policy is not consistent. Such and Walker contrast theresponsibilities attributed to children in crime and anti-social behaviourpolicies with the lack of responsibility accorded them in family policy. Theyobserve that it is notable that children appear only to be granted agencyand autonomy in the context of wrong-doing: children are able to be

wilfully irresponsible but not wilfully responsible (2005, p.46). Their articlereports on an exploratory study of childrens own understandings of


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responsibility in the context of family life. They conclude thatresponsibility is a meaningful and everyday aspect of many childrenslives. To shy away from recognising thisserves to deny children socialcitizenship (pp54-6).

Its possible to point to examples of how children assume responsibility inboth the private and public spheres. In the private sphere, an importantexample highlighted in the literature is the heavy responsibility adopted bychildren who take on the role of young carers. In the public sphere, anumber of research studies as well as media reports reveal a fair amountof formal and informal volunteering and social action among children andyoung people.

Although I am talking about children in the UK, it is worth noting here thatin many countries in the global South, children have to take on a range ofadult responsibilities in both private and public spheres, particularly where

their families have been ravaged by HIV-Aids. In addition, in somecountries children are used as soldiers a traditional duty of citizenship.

Equality of status, respect and recognition

To treat others with respect is seen by the general public as a keyresponsibility of citizenship. It is one that children are as capable ofexercising as anyone else. Conversely, Bren Neale defines citizenship forchildren as an entitlement to recognition, respect and participation (2004:1). Yet, as hinted at already, a common theme in the literature is the lackof recognition and respect for the responsibilities that children and young

people exercise. This reflects a wider sense that children are notrespected and therefore do not enjoy genuine equality of status as citizensin the here and now. This is particularly true of children being brought upin poverty. It is therefore encouraging that the Scottish Executives visionfor children rests in part on them being respected and responsible.

As Barbara Hobson and I have argued with reference to gender andcitizenship lack of recognition implies exclusion and marginalisation fromfull participation in the community. The childrens movement, whichaccording to Stasiulis enacts an alternative imaginary of childrens activecitizenship, can be understood as a struggle for recognition.

Lessons from the feminist critique?

This brings us to the possible parallels between the feminist critique andthe critiques of childrens relationship to citizenship. There are clearparallels but I dont think that means one can simply transpose the feministcritique without adaptation.

The first point to make is that just as feminists have exposed the maletemplate underpinning traditional meanings of citizenship so can we arguethat it is an adult template, which measures children against an adult normand which ignores the particularities of childrens relationship to

citizenship. The difference is that, in modern times at least, citizenshipsuniversalism was supposed to cover women, in theory at least, whereas


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mainstream accounts of citizenship do not typically make any claims toinclude children.

The reasons used to justify womens earlier exclusion from citizenship arevery similar to those used to justify childrens exclusion: notably their lack

of competence, in particular to be rational (Hill and Tisdall, p25), and theirdependency. Hill and Tisdall question the use of rationality as a criterion,pointing out that adults do not necessarily always act rationally in decision-making whatever their capacities. Priscilla Alderson states thatcompetence seems to be as much in the eye of the beholder as the abilityof the child (1992, p. 175). This, she suggests, points to a need todevelop new ways of defining and assessing childrens competence.According to the UNICEF report, most of the thinking on this has been inrelation to medical consent. What is needed is the same kind ofassessment of the capacities necessary for citizenship.

While I think there is a legitimate question concerning the competence forcitizenship of babies and very young children, the literature is abound withexamples of where children have otherwise shown themselves to becompetent in the skills and capacities required for participation as citizens.Moreover, as Alderson has pointed out, treating children with respect canmarkedly increase their competence (1992: 175).

The treatment in the literature of dependence as an obstacle to childrenscitizenship echoes some of the arguments in the feminist literature.Writing about young people, Jones and Wallace explicitly draw parallels to

argue that the extended dependence of young people as a result of policydevelopments has damaged their status as citizens. More recently, Jonesand Bell claim that citizenship is meaningless without economicindependence (2000: 60). Children in our society of course lack itcompletely, except for whatever part-time wages they may earn.

As noted early, any social security rights for children are by proxy. A keyfeminist policy argument has been that womens right to social securityshould be individualised and not mediated through their partner. This is, Ithink, a more difficult argument to apply to children who, so long as theyare required to attend school and do not have the potential to earn a wage

to support themselves, are necessarily dependent economically uponparents or other adults who are responsible for their protection. Once theyare 16, the situation changes. And if one were to pay say child benefitdirect to children above a certain age, the implications for (usually)mothers ability to juggle household finances would need to be considered.

While childrens economic dependence is incompatible with full rights associalcitizens, it does not follow that children lose their claim to be active,participatingcitizens. As Stasiulis argues, dependency arising from theneed for protection is not incompatible with the right to participation. Toquote: A framework of rights that implies that only fully autonomous

people may enjoy participation rights normalizes individual independence.Indeed, the mutual reinforcement of protection and participation rights is


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integral to the model of childrens citizenship advanced in the childrensmovement (2002: 513-4).

The critique of the normalisation of independence chimes with a strand offeminist argument. Iris Youngs distinction between independence as

autonomy (the ability to make and act upon ones choices) and as self-sufficiency (not needing help or support from anyone in meeting onesneeds and carrying out ones life plans) is helpful here, for the autonomyassociated with citizenship does not require an illusory self-sufficiency.Moss and Petrie (2005) point out that feminist arguments about humaninterdependence can be applied to children as well as adults. This claim issupported by Such and Walkers exploratory study, which indicated thatcrucial components of responsibility were found to be its interdependenceand relational nature (2005: 48).

Although childrens dependence is a product of the care they receive,

whereas womens stems from the care theyprovide, as observed earliersome children are also care-providers. As such, the work involved wouldbe recognised as the exercise of citizenship responsibility in some feministframeworks. Children may also help adult care providers in the home invarious ways, particularly in two-earner and in lone parent families. Intheir discussion of childrens dependence, Moss and Petrie endorse thefeminist critique of the normative image of the independent wage-earningcitizen which is at heart of contemporary notions of social participation andcitizenship (2005: 85). The displacement of that normative image infeminist critiques is thus also relevant for children in education, whose

claim to citizenship cannot, in Western societies, lie through wage-earning,even if some children do earn a part-time wage.

As in the case of women, the link between (in)dependence, care andcitizenship is mediated by the public-private divide for children too. Cohendraws the analogy between coverture, under which married womenforfeited independent legal status, and the way in which children arefolded into the legal identity of their parents upon birth (2005: 229). So,she argues, where women once ceded a public identity to their husbandsand retreated (often reluctantly) to the private realm, children remainprivatized by analogous forces (ibid.). Similarly, in the same way that it

was once considered permissible for men to inflict violence upon theirfemale partners in the private sphere, so, in the UK, it is still lawful forparents to hit their children.(Scotland?)

Moreover, whereas women are now generally part of the public as well asthe private sphere, commentators have pointed to how children areincreasingly being excluded from public space (or are concentrated inadult-controlled spaces). According to Save the Children childrens use ofpublic space has decreased significantly since the 1970s (2005: 3).Wyness et alargue that children are located within the hidden privatesphere and at best viewed as political animals in potentia (2004: 86).


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Another reason why children and to a lesser extent today women arenot seen as political animals or citizens reflects a distinction that can bemade between formal and informal forms of politics. Both women andchildren who participate in informal politics frequently describe what theyare doing as not political. Traditionally, informal forms of politics and

social action have not counted as political citizenship in the same waythat formal politics has.

Even more perhaps than feminist accounts, critiques of the construction ofchildren's citizenship are centred on power relationships. Both womensand childrens economic dependence are closely linked to unequal powerrelations. Womens and childrens groups are both fighting for more poweras citizens and both have, inevitably, encountered resistance. Moregenerally, Roche notes that one constant theme in much writing aboutchildrens rights is the deep sense of powerlessness and exclusion felt bychildren and young people (1999: 478). Indeed, Hill and Tisdall suggest

that power is the main differentiating factor between children and adults(1997: 20). Some inequality of power is perhaps inevitable in a way that itis not between adult women and men. Tom Burke, the student mentionedat the outset, makes clear that he is not suggesting that the citizenshipyoung people enjoy is the same citizenship that adults have for the veryreason that in almost every circumstance young people have less powerthan adults and adult-run institutions, such as government (2005: 52)

Burkes statement that young peoples citizenship is not the same as thatof adults brings us to a final parallel between the gendered citizenship and

childrens citizenship literatures: whether claims to citizenship are made onthe basis of sameness/equality or difference. The argument for childrenscitizenship is predicated in part on a fundamental sameness and equalityas human beings. Moreover, to state the obvious, children become adults,whereas women do not normally become men. Any arguments based ondifference are therefore arguments that pertain only to a particular stage ofthe life-course. Nevertheless these arguments are salient. Roche, forinstance, comments that save for the child liberationists, no one isarguing that children are identical to adults or that they should enjoyexactly the same bundle of civil and political rights as adults (1999: 487).

Nor is anyone arguing that they should exercise exactly the same bundleof responsibilities rather, again redolent of feminist arguments, that theresponsibilities they do exercise should be recognised. And someadvocates of the imaginary of the active child citizen acknowledge thedangers of casting participation as a responsibility for children. The rightof the child not to participate must also be respected. Stasiulis, forinstance, asks does childrens citizenship then tend to devalue the right ofchildren to remain children with all its implications such as playfulness,lightness and childishness? (2002: 509). Proponents of childrens activecitizenship need to be wary of subordinating childrens right to be children(as understood in this particular cultural context) to the higher calling of the

demands of citizenship in the here and now in an instrumental way thatmirrors the treatment of children as citizens of the future.


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Concluding comments

Roche concludes his piece with a statement resonant of feministarguments: traditional notions of citizenship will have to change toaccommodate children (1999: 485). But he does not really say how. This

takes us back to the question posed by Hill and Tisdall with which Istarted. I am not going to attempt a definitive answer. I do not think wecan discard what they call the building blocks of citizenship in order toaccommodate children. But feminist critiques have shown how some ofthose building blocks can be re-shaped in order better to do so.

A key move is one that Roche makes earlier in his article, namely to getaway from the idea of substantive citizenship as an absolute the ideathat you either are a citizen or you are not. That has been my purpose inunpacking the building blocks and analysing childrens citizenship inrelation to each one of them.

Roche prefers Bulmer and Rees notion of partial citizenship toCockburns more linear unfolding or incremental citizenship. I am not sosure. Bulmer and Rees lump together women, children and peopleincapacitated in some way under the label of partial citizenship. This failsto distinguish between the elements of partial citizenship that are more orless accepted as a corollary of a persons dependent status and those thatare challenged as illegitimate. Thus, there is no justification for womensstatus as partial citizens whereas some aspects of childrens citizenshipstatus arguably can be thought of as unfinished. Neale describes

citizenship as an unfolding process that cannot simply be switched on atsome arbitrary point in a childs life (2004: 17). This is a different kind ofpartial citizenship to that which stems from the fact of being a woman, orsay a member of a minority ethnic group. Cohen uses the term semi-citizenship to denote childrens partial citizenship. She describes it as amiddle ground in which children are citizens by certain standards and notby others (2005: 234).

Ive elsewhere drawn a distinction between being a citizen and acting as acitizen: to be a citizen, in the legal and sociological sense, means to enjoythe rights of citizenship necessary for agency and social and political

participation. To act as a citizen involves fulfilling the full potential of thestatus. Those who do not fulfil that potential do not cease to be citizens;moreover, in practice participation tends to be more of a continuum thanan all or nothing affair and people might participate more or less atdifferent points in the life-course. This formulation does not work forchildren. Rather, some children are acting as citizens without first enjoyingthe full rights of citizenship.

In fact, much of the literature that is making the case for recognition ofchildren as citizens is not so much arguing for an extension of adult rights(and obligations) of citizenship to children but recognition that their

citizenship practice (where it occurs) constitutes them as de facto, even ifnot complete de jure, citizens. It is also calling for adults to transform their


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relationship to children particularly in terms of respectful behaviour andchanges in the way participatory citizenship is practised in order toaccommodate children. Finally, it is challenging the idea that it is sufficientto treat children purely as citizens of the future. As Cohen points out, asociety that is preoccupied with the adults children will become is likely to

pay less attention to the individuals that they are at various ages andstages of development and to the particular needs and interests of childcitizens as a group (2005: 230).

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