Societal views and Child rights…

There still appears to be a problem here. If we take for example liberty, under the equal treatment thesis, a child would possess this right, yet at the same time, intuitively at least not too many parents and others in society would feel at ease with a child of six or seven having the same liberty claims that an adult might have. We would tend to think that a seven year old who decided they wanted to leave home and join the circus for example, should be constrained from undertaking this activity. Yet we would not necessarily, attempt to constrain an adult from this course of action. This would suggest then that when we are considering the unequal treatment thesis we are not just talking about rights over and above basic rights, in many cases we are talking about constricting, though not dispensing with completely basic human rights. As we shall see later however, this problem can be solved by both looking at the rights themselves and looking at how we conceive the relationship between parents and children.