Childhood competence and autonomy.

Abstract

FAMILY autonomy and children's rights issues involve subtle empirical and moral problems. The empirical issues relate to childhood judgmental capacities both in general and in specific contexts. The moral issues are wide-ranging and relate to some of the most fundamental issues in moral philosophy and social policy. While the impetus for much of the social interest in children's rights issues is the depressing statistic of child abuse and neglect, the continuous rethinking of social relationships in general and a concern for social justice have also contributed to the intensity of the debate and the range of the alternatives proposed. Legal and social institutions are increasingly integrating children's expressions of their preferences into the catalog of interests that institutions take as carrying weight.' This reflects a reevaluation of the child's social status as something more than an extension of parental interests. While this reevaluation is commendable, it calls into question the place of the child in the family-the child's primary environment. In what follows I want to focus on the relationship between parents and children, especially pre-adolescent and early adolescent children. The particular points I wish to develop can be summarized as follows: There is apparently good evidence that the judgmental capacities of children through age fourteen suffer biases that are significant and germane to autonomy issues; however, such biases have no immediate public policy implications because we lack a precise theory supporting any baseline