Benforado's 'A Minor Revolution' Proposes Improving the Rights of Children
One of the all-time best books that I have read with respect to child policy is Adam Benforado’s A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All.
His book offers an outstanding historical, educational, legal, and political analysis of how our society and government should treat children that is straightforward to anybody interested in the well-being and best interests of children. Even to a long-time child advocate like myself, his discussion and arguments are informative, insightful, and powerful.
In fact, I would urge every parent, child advocate, and government official to read it. Even if you think child well-being doesn’t impact you, Benforado makes a logical and compelling case that the issues of importance to child well-being matter to all of us.
History of Child Policy and Children’s Fundamental Rights
In his book, Benforado traces the historical ebbs and flows of how children have been viewed – or more accurately, how they are often unseen, invisible, or treated as an afterthought – throughout our nation’s history.
From our country’s inception, children were initially treated as the property of their fathers, whereby children could be “used, sold, or hired out” to employers. Laws even protected parents from prosecution due to horrific abuse or even the death of children.
As Barbara Bennett Woodhouse points out in her book Hidden in Plain Sight: The Tragedy of Children’s Rights from Ben Franklin to Lionel Tate:
When they declared it self-evident that all men were created equal, they certainly did not mean to emancipate their slaves, their women, or their children.
Woodhouse adds:
As late as 1920, a parent who killed a child in the course of punishment could claim a legal excuse for homicide in no fewer than nine states.
Fortunately, we have made some progress in society since those days. In the early 1900s, “child savers” began to challenge the “poor treatment of children” and pushed for child welfare improvements, the enactment of child labor laws, and the creation of the Children’s Bureau in 1912. These were monumental changes and challenged this notion of kids as the property of their parents. Among other advances, “child savers” sought to stop the practice of children and their labor being “used, sold, or hired out” by parents and to protect children from the physical abuse and neglect of their parents.
However, while important progress in many areas was made, Benforado highlights that more than a century after the “child savers” reforms, children in the world’s most prosperous nation continue to needlessly suffer:
A hundred years on, children still go hungry. Children still end up on the street when their families can’t make rent. Not a handful of children – millions. In America today, one in six kids grows up in poverty.
Furthermore, children are often tragically not recognized as having fundamental basic human rights in our society simply because they are young. In fact, the U.S. is the only nation in the world that has failed to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. We are, as Benforado says, “defiant and alone.”
Compounding the problem for children, they often get the worst of both worlds when it comes to societal judgments and rules about their rights and responsibilities. For example, children are often treated as adults by the justice system with respect to policing and incarceration, but not protected from harm in matters of child safety and protection.
Despite some important gains, such as the passage of federal child labor laws and protections in the early 1900s, Benforado highlights how our nation still allows child labor, including health-threatening work on tobacco farms, and that there is a movement in a number of states – including Arkansas and Iowa – to weaken what child labor laws we have.
In this respect, we are backtracking.
Our legal system threatens further regression. For example, “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution, such as those by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, are terribly problematic for children. In Justice Thomas’s situation, he uses distorted versions of the historical record and issues opinions that are typically harmful to children and would set kids back not just decades – but centuries.
Benforado has considered such enduring barriers to progress for children and proposes an updated view and understanding of the Constitution that recognizes children have fundamental rights. As he explains:
Imagine that the dominant approach to interpreting the Constitution was not originalism – asking what reasonable people living in the eighteenth century would have thought the text meant – but what the words ought to mean in light of the best interests of children.
We need a judicial advocacy agenda for children in this country, and Professor Benforado’s toolkit would be game-changing for future generations.
Investing In Children Is in All of Our Interests
We are also failing to invest in our children. In First Focus on Children’s annual publication, Children’s Budget, we document how the share of federal funding dedicated to children had dropped to an all-time low of 7.55% in 2020. The consequences of this are enormous.
For example, even concerning the most basic child well-being indicators, the U.S. is failing its children. In 2018, children and youth in the U.S. were 70% more likely to die before adulthood than in our wealthy nations. Since then, the U.S. mortality rate has grown due to recent increases in homicide and suicide rates among our kids. This should result in a clarion call for action. Instead, millions of children are being disenrolled from medical coverage (i.e., Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program) at this very moment due to bureaucratic and procedural barriers that some states are imposing.
To make matters worse, even when the nation has taken action, such as attempting to provide children protection from harm (i.e., negative rights), the institutions our society creates are, as Beneforado points out, “often paternalistic and authoritarian.” For instance, the child welfare and family court systems regularly fail to even consider the voices, concerns, and best interests of children.
Again, children are not considered to have rights, voice, or agency and are, instead, marginalized, ignored, and treated as bargaining chips in battles between adults, including custody fights. As Benforado says, “The word ‘custody’ is particularly apt: we use it for children, property, and prisoners.”
Benforado points out that the U.S. has also failed to grant children much-needed affirmative rights, such as health care, nutrition, and housing. This has far-reaching negative ramifications for their future. As Benforado points out, “…today’s young people are likely to face significantly worse financial prospects – more debt, more unemployment, less homeownership, and lower wages – than their parents….”
He adds that even if we won’t do it for them, we should do it for ourselves, as it is in all of our interests. Benforado points to a raft of research that points to the cost-effectiveness of making investments in children, particularly in the earliest years, to “foster healthy, successful, productive human beings.”
He explains:
Childhood is the window of opportunity.
Our inattention and inaction, then, are not simply a moral problem; they are also an economic and social one. By failing our children today, we doom ourselves in the years ahead. The root cause of nearly every major challenge we face – from crime to poor health to -poverty – can be found in our mistreatment of children. But in that sobering truth is also the key to effectively changing our fate as a nation.
What About Parental Rights?
This failure to make significant progress and improve the lives of children has occurred, in part, due to the parental rights movement which has argued that “if anyone were to be given rights, it was mom and dad, not kids.”
This has a long history in the U.S.. For example, the parental rights movement initially fought the passage of child labor laws because they argued it was a threat to parental liberty.
Opponents of integration of schools after Brown v. Board of Education also used “parental rights” as an argument for the establishment of “segregation academies” across the country.
In the 1990s, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan took up the mantel as a moral crusade to fight cultural battles in the name of “parental rights.”
If this sounds familiar, it should.
Although nobody disputes the importance of parents in the lives of children, there is a push to gut or marginalize the roles of government in education and in protecting the health and safety of children from such things as child abuse or dangerous commercial products. In some states, parents can legally deny life-saving medical treatment for their children under the guise of parental rights.
As Benforado says, “…even after a child gets gravely – and obviously – ill, a parent is permitted to decide against medical care.” Parents can deny their children access to prevention measures such as immunizations, mental health or substance abuse treatment, or even life-saving cancer treatment.
The consequences are, far too often, tragic and deadly. As Benforado points out, “What, in any other circumstance, would be deemed a homicide is accepted as sound parenting.”
And what about when parents disagree about the course of treatment or non-treatment? If one parent disagrees with children getting cancer treatment or a vaccine, does that opinion override or forestall the decision of the other parent and the child to get cancer treatment or an immunization? Does the adolescent have any say in their own body, health, or well-being?
Beyond the threats this movement poses to the education, health care, and safety of children, the parental rights movement’s self-absorbed focus on their own rights sidelines the needs, concerns, and interests of the very people who are most deserving of attention: CHILDREN.
Benforado points out:
So often, children are at the back of our minds, not the front. They are afterthoughts or never noticed at all. They are invisible when they are right before us. What’s particularly worrying is that even those charged directly with protecting kids are often infected with this heedlessness, a careless apathy. At critical moments, even they are just going through the motions.
The result is a dizzying array of laws and court decisions that conflict as to whether young people have the right to health care, bodily autonomy, privacy, or confidentiality, including whether teens can access medical services without parental consent, whether children can be forced by parents to undergo certain types of “treatment” over their objection, or whether the government can overturn both the decisions of parents and children, as in the case of states denying teens (even those who are victims of rape or incest) the ability to have an abortion or to seek gender-affirming care.
Therefore, Benforado argues that we need to adopt a “children-first mindset” and recognize that children have needs, concerns, and fundamental rights that should play an important role in decision-making and agenda-setting in matters that impact their lives. Parents absolutely matter, but the roles of government and those of children themselves should not be disregarded or ignored.
For example, do students really want and need an educational system that is focused on book bans, censorship, speech codes, the whitewashing of history, the denial of AP Psychology for credit, the denial of access to health care services, and where parents and educators act out through chaotic school board meetings as adversaries, or would children be better served if parents, schools, and lawmakers were working together on securing full funding to schools that would address the educational, health care, nutrition, and safety needs, concerns, and interests of children?
After all, education is a children’s issue. It is about their hopes, dreams, and aspirations and not about making kids into nothing more than “mini-me” versions of their parents.
Benforado points out that focusing on the needs and concerns of children is also in the best interests of parents. For example, should we have a system where parents go at it alone and have to assess and make medical and safety decisions based on their gathering the facts and conducting independent scientific testing on matters such as vaccines, cancer treatment, seat belts, and water quality? Or would it be better for children and parents alike if we were to have access to the expertise of doctors and nurses and the scientific studies and measures of water and air quality that go into regulatory standards to protect children from lead and pollution and help protect the health and safety of children?
Benforado convincingly makes the case, to both questions, that it is in everybody’s interest to adopt a “children-first mindset” and to work together toward child well-being. He explains:
In general, when it comes to helping children reach their potential, It is our broad societal policies, not our individual choices, that matter most. But the business of raising kids is atomized: each family is left on its own to sink or swim.
The consequence is that we are failing children, and society devalues and shortchanges them, their needs, and their best interests. He adds:
Despite our great concern with keeping our kids safe, we end up protecting them from the wrong things – swear words, country mud, library books – while leaving them exposed to significant dangers: pollution, guns, bullying.
Institutions, in fact, are often set up and incentivized to fail children. It is by design.
Benforado explains:
Across the board, the most prominent and authoritative entities in society – churches, universities, businesses, and governments – that could do a huge amount to curb danger to kids, instead put their efforts into protecting themselves from lawsuits and bad press.
Instead, by working together and focusing on and including the voices and concerns of children, we will come to set better priorities and make better decisions with children. Frankly, only kids really understand and are the real experts as to what it is like to experience school shootings, lockdowns, bullying over the internet, etc.
Furthermore, the decisions made today, on issues such as climate change, have far more profound consequences on them than an 85-year-old senior citizen. Thus, our young people deserve to be heard on broader societal issues. Benforado writes:
Young people, as a group, view the issues differently from older people, not because they are unreasonable but because they are wearing different lenses – ones shaped by a different set of identities, challenges, and experiences… On many issues, young people may encourage us to rethink long-held assumptions, reform antiquated practices, and seize opportunities.
Kids deserve a seat at the table rather than to be treated as a bargaining chip in battles between adults.
Creating a Children-First Mindset
Throughout the book, Benforado offers an array of well-thought-out policy solutions toward striving to improve the lives and well-being of children. These changes include expanding voting rights to adolescents, requiring government to assess the impact on children in any regulations or actions it takes, and changing the ways that businesses must address the best interests of children.
A Minor Revolution is a must-read and a clarion call for how we should reorient our society toward the needs, concerns, best interests, and rights of children. To the skeptics and haters, Benforado offers this rejoinder:
Those who assail the recognition of a child as a full human being – worthy of respect, protection, and autonomy – are the same who denied personhood to Black people, who laughed at the idea of women being able to attend college, who told us that the institution of marriage would crumble once gay people were permitted to wed. But kids aren’t the same, you say. Perhaps. But then, second-class citizenship always seems natural, obvious, and justified to the privileged. We will not reach our destination if we leave the kids behind. Their march is our march. We cannot progress alone.
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