The rights of children are rights to protection rather than rights to choice. what does it mean?

Question

give example of right to protection and rights to choice.
(child psychology)

Answer 1

All rights are protections -- things the govt cannot do, or that other people cannot do to you.

Rights of choice mean that the govt (or others) cannot limit what you choose to do -- that's one type of protection. The right to choose your own religion, or to choose who you associate with, or to choose where you want to live -- those are rights of choice.

Other rights of protection mean the govt CAN limit what other people do to you -- such as criminal laws, etc.

Answer 2

They have a right to be protected and nourished and housed.
They have no right to decide on their own what to do where to go and what to say. That is what maturity is about, obtaining and practicing rights.

Answer 3

"One thought would be that although children are entitled to the same moral consideration as adults it does not follow that children should possess the same package of rights as adults. Since children are humans they are surely entitled to the basic human rights. But there are some rights possessed by adults which children cannot possess. This is a view defended by Brennan and Noggle (Brennan and Noggle 1997). The rights which adults possess are ‘role-dependent rights’. These are rights associated with particular roles, and possession of the relevant right is dependent on an ability to play the role. Thus doctors have rights that their patients do not, and car-drivers have rights that those who have not passed their driving test do not. This argument is interesting not least because it does not provide, in respect of their rights, a fundamental distinction between adults and children. After all some adults could conceivably possess no more than the basic rights possessed by children since they might have none of the abilities required to play any of the roles associated with the role-dependent rights.

However it is not obvious that children do have the basic human rights that adults have. Central amongst these rights is that of self-determination, that is the right to make choices in respect of one's own life. This right is the basis of derivative rights to marry, have sex, choose one's work, purse a course of education, and so on. But it is just this right that is normally denied to children, and it seems that Noggle and Brennan do deny, in effect, that children have this right. If parents can, as Brennan and Noggle think they may, overrule a child's life-choice it is hard to see how nevertheless the right of choice does not vanish (Brennan and Noggle 1997, 16-17). If one adult were to deny that another adult could choose as she wished it would be natural to describe this as a denial of the second adult's right of choice.

To say that children do not have all the basic human rights that adults do is not to deny them their status as humans. After all it makes sense to insist that children, but not animals, have a basic right to life. Vegetarians who think it immoral to kill animals for food do not — as they could — protect animals from being killed by other animals. They do not require a predatory species not to violate the rights of its animal victims. But we do think children have a right to be protected and that we should enforce the duty on adults not to harm them. It also makes sense, as suggested, to say that children do not have an adult right of self-determination. It is controversial to say that children are ‘persons’, since, following John Locke, this term denotes those possessed of moral agency and capable of being responsible for their actions. Weaker or stronger conceptions of ‘personhood’ would lead to the inclusion or exclusion of humans at various ages from the category of person. However it is not controversial to state that children are human, and in saying this to insist that they are entitled to a certain moral regard

Most who believe that adults have rights which children do not have make the cut between liberty and welfare rights. Feinberg distinguishes between rights that belong only to adults (A-rights), rights that are common to both adults and children (A-C-rights), and rights that children alone possess (C-rights) (Feinberg 1980). Thus a common position is that the A-rights include, centrally, the liberty rights, and that the A-C-rights include, centrally, the welfare rights. To repeat, liberty rights are rights of choice (how and whether to vote, what to say publicly, whether to practise a religion and which one, which if any association to join, and so on) whereas welfare rights protect important interests (such as health, bodily integrity, and privacy).

What might be included in the C-rights? Feinberg distinguishes between two sub-classes of C-rights. There are, first, those rights which children possess in virtue of their condition of childishness. Although Feinberg does not further divide this first sub-class of C-rights this can be done. There are the rights children have to receive those goods they are incapable of securing for themselves, and are incapable of so doing because of their dependence upon adults. These goods might include food and shelter. There are, second, the rights to be protected against harms which befall children because of their childlike vulnerability and whose particular harmfulness is a function of a fact that they befall children. These harms might include abuse and neglect. Finally, there are goods that children should arguably receive just because they are children. The most central, and contentious, example is a child's right to be loved."

(somehow, I suspect this question may be related to abortion debates.)