03 Sep Children: Property, Pets, Projects Or People?
Samantha Brennan reflects upon how we consider our kids – and asks whether, in thinking so much about the adults they will become, we risk overlooking the value of childhood itself.
How do you think about your children? As a philosopher and the parent of three children – aged nine, 11 and 15 when I first wrote this article – I began to wonder about the different conceptions we have of children and how these conceptions affect the way we treat the younger members of our societies and our families. Are children ‘persons’ with all the rights that this entails? Or are they property, owned by their parents and subject to their absolute authority? Maybe children are neither ‘property’ nor ‘persons’, but something in between.
The economist Nancy Folbre worries that we think of children like pets; as a kind of property that is governed by some, but not many, rules regarding its care. Others claim that we modern parents tend to think of our children as projects, in which we invest a lot of time, energy and effort.
Thinking about children and their rights
I started thinking philosophically about children when my partner and I decided some years ago to become foster parents. That process opened my eyes to the neglect and abuse of children in my otherwise affluent and caring society (Canada) and I ended up writing some papers on the rights of children. Later, I joined a national, interdisciplinary research team called Children, Family, and the State, and our discussions expanded to include the relationships between families and the larger communities in which we live.
My academic discipline, philosophy, has tended to ignore children as having little moral and political significance, although that was beginning to change when I first wrote this article. There is a growing body of literature in moral and political philosophy that examines the rights of children and the responsibilities we have towards them.
However, while philosophers no longer neglect children completely, our philosophical broadmindedness has not necessarily expanded to include childhood. When we philosophers do pay attention to children, we tend to do so in terms of the adults they will become. And I worry that this focus, reflected also in trends in parenting and education, may leave out some important issues. There may be aspects of childhood that are valuable for children, even if they aren’t justified in terms of benefiting the future adults those children will become.
How have we neglected childhood? I want to give you one example from my world, academic writing in the field of philosophy, and then I’ll turn to some examples from our shared world as parents and educators.
Joel Feinberg is an American philosopher who wrote what many consider to be a groundbreaking essay on the rights of children. In this essay, ‘A Child’s Right to an Open Future’, Feinberg argues that children have rights and that the main right children have is the right to an ‘open’ future. As parents, it’s our job, according to Feinberg, to bring our children to adulthood with a robust range of life choices available to them. We educate them, nurture them and help them develop, but we have to do so in a way that respects their autonomy.
That sounds good, and it’s a much-needed correction to the children-as-property model I mentioned earlier, but it leaves childhood out of the picture. Our main focus as parents, Feinberg thinks, is producing autonomous adults.
Are we too focused on the future?
Here is a less-abstract example of this future-directed thinking at work. Parents have to make difficult decisions about how best to discipline children. Our styles of parenting will be influenced by our friends and family and by the books and articles about parenting we read. But much of the consideration focuses on whether or not various disciplinary techniques work in the long run. However, we seem not to worry so much about the short-term effects – about the impact it has on children as children. Contrast this with the way that we treat other adults.
I think that we are so future-directed when it comes to decisions about children because we tend to see childhood purely in negative terms. The philosopher Gareth Matthews describes the negative conception of childhood as stemming from the work of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle wrote of childhood as an essentially prospective state. Writes Matthews: “Given this, what is good for a child will tend to be understood as something that will contribute to its good in adulthood. Moreover, the goods of childhood will be, on the whole, derivative from the goods of adulthood.”
In the negative conception, childhood is seen simply as a time of deficits. Compared with adults, children are smaller, weaker, less rational, less autonomous and so on, and the process of growing up consists largely of acquiring the skills and abilities and physical form of a human adult. In the negative conception, children are merely inferior adults, and childhood is a state to be survived. Because children are weaker, we owe them protection, according to this view, but we owe them that protection by virtue of the person they will become.
Childhood itself, in this view, is seen as preparation for adult life – filled with study, exercise and lessons in socialisation – so that the child can emerge well-prepared for adult life. Childhood is the period in which raw material is drilled into shape.
There are more laissez-faire versions of this view too, in which the transition from child to adult is seen as natural and does not require any special tutoring or preparation. Childhood is like a long, sleepy summer vacation during which nothing of any particular importance happens. In this model, childhood is about waiting for adulthood, rather than frantically preparing for it, but the idea remains the same. Not much that happens in childhood counts. What matters most is the adult one becomes.
Children as personal projects
I think the negative conception of childhood is familiar. Many of us may even think of our own lives in that way, or look in this way at the lives of our children. Certainly it was an alarming trend I saw among parents at the time, for whom the ‘children as property’ model had given way to the ‘children as personal projects’ model. Participants in the practice of competitive parenting compare milestones along the way (‘How did your child fare in the most recent piano exam?’) but what matters most is the end result – how accomplished an adult one ultimately produces.
One explanation for this view about the insignificance of childhood comes from our preference for certain kinds of life stories. We prefer lives in which things start out bad and get better, over lives that start out good and then go downhill. A friend and I were chatting about this being a positive aspect of having been a geek at high school. Given where we started, we’re almost bound to be more socially savvy and better looking now than we were then. And there is something sad about the smartest and best-looking kids in high school for whom that was their pinnacle of achievement.
But we do miss out if we fail to pay attention to childhood for its own sake. And when we are raising and educating children, we would do well to pay attention to their lives as they are, as well as the adults they’ll become.
Part two: What does it mean to value childhood for its own sake?
About the author: Samantha Brennan is Dean of the College of Arts and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Canada. Her areas of specialisation include moral theory, social and political philosophy, feminist theory and feminist ethics.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by CHILD in 2008. It has been lightly edited and updated for publication online in 2026.
