1.2 Children's rights
What are children’s rights?
What is the Convention on the Rights of the Child?
Do you ever hear about child rights in your work or community?
Children grow up in very different contexts, in families and societies with different values and resources. Ideas of childhood vary considerably. While all societies recognize the difference between infancy, childhood and adulthood, views vary about what childhood represents and what children are able to do and not do and how they should be treated.
In some cases, children experience environments that violate their rights and adversely affect their development. Children may be nutritionally deprived, live in unsafe environments or experience maltreatment and abuse. What has been done to help protect children and their rights?
Convention on the Rights of the Child
The United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was unanimously adopted by the United Nations in 1989 (UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti, n.d.). More countries adopted the CRC faster than any other human rights treaty. All United Nations’ member states, except for the United States, ratified the CRC. It put children’s rights on the political agendas of many countries.
The CRC outlines:
- the rights of children
- what is needed in order to protect them
- what is needed to foster environments where they not only survive, but thrive.
2019 marked the 30 year anniversary of the CRC. The UNICEF website is an excellent resource with a wealth of information about the Convention of the Rights of the Child and highlights some of the achievements over the past 30 years as well as remaining challenges.
The following document describes the Articles in the CRC in child-friendly language.
Can you think of ways to use this document to increase awareness and understanding of the Convention on the Rights of the Child?
The Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children (CCRC) works to achieve full implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Canada and around the world. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the guiding framework for all activities of the coalition.
What children experience each day matters. The day-to-day moments of life are deeply felt. Feeling left out from a particular group of friends, whether at the water table or on the playground, can be a strong, unpleasant experience. Even if seemingly minor or mediocre experiences may not matter much in the long run of learning and development, they can make a very unhappy day for a small child.
A focus on a child’s rights to be happy and engaged is a focus on early childhood education in the immediate here and now rather than on what they will become in the future. Children’s early learning and development become by-products of the environments that children and early childhood educators create together.
In the next clip (a video made by college students), a group of Winnipeg children identify some of their rights.
What do you think, should we be encouraging preschool and primary school-age children to think about their rights?
What can you do to promote awareness and understanding of children’s rights?
Article 31 in the Convention on the Rights of the Child is about a child’s right to play. The next reading is from the Children’s right to play: An examination of the importance of play in the lives of children worldwide (2010) by Lester and Russell.
Canada signed onto the The United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and it is up to us as citizens of this country to be aware of these rights and how they are being upheld.
