Recently I have recognized and interesting tension that underlies the moral codes tha twe obligate parents to fulffill toward stheir children. One hand we are perfectly comfortable describing what a child may be entitled to receive. For example: Food, shelter, education, healthcare, protection from violence, a reasonable degree of freedom. These can be stated in terms of rights, and when those rights are violated we have little difficulty condemning or casting responsibility towards them. Parents who does not feed their children are neglectful. Those parent who excessively punish their child not for their own interests are abusive. However I think that even if these needs are met, there are certain reponsibilities that the moral canon does not obligate.
Imagine two children raised in households with roughly the same material standard of living. Both are adequately fed, clothed, educated and protected and either suffers any obvious deprivation. Yet one grows up in a household where his parents ask about his thoughts, read with him, encourage his curiosities, allow him to experiment, take an interest in his strange little obsessions and gradually teach him how to make decisions for himself. The other grows up in a home where none of his necessities are neglected, but his parents are largely indifferent to what he thinks, prohibit him from doing things they consider unnecessary, direct his interests towards whatever they regard as useful and give him very little of their time.
It would be peculiar to say that these children have been treated equally justly merely because their inalienable rights have been preserved. Clearly the difference in treatment outside provision of necessities has an impact on their wellbeing and character, if not their future and is as important as their rights. So is there a moral imperative to care for a human being beyond their needs, particularly when that human being is a child who cannot yet care for himself?
I do not mean that children should receive everything they want. Nor do I mean that every parental sacrifice is morally obligatory. Parents are not required to create a perfect childhood, nor can such a thing even be coherently defined. Every child is different, every household has different constraints, and there is no established manual capable of determining exactly how much attention, freedom, money or opportunity ought to be given to one particular child. What interests me is something narrower and more difficult. If a child cannot yet reliably protect his own interests, form fully mature judgments, or even understand what his future interests might be, does the parent owe him something beyond the minimum that his rights establish?
The distinction matters because rights are usually conceived as a floor. They tell us what cannot justly be taken away, or what must be supplied to prevent serious deprivation. But a floor is not a ceiling. We would not normally say that because a person has a right to food, they have received everything they are morally owed when they have been fed enough to survive. And yet when discussing children, moral reasoning often seems to terminate suspiciously quickly once material necessities have been secured.
John Stuart Mill provides one reason why children complicate our ordinary conception of moral autonomy. His defence of liberty rests on the assumption that individuals are capable of directing their own lives. A mature person may make an absurd decision, but the fact that it is absurd does not by itself give another person the right to interfere. Children are different precisely because they have not yet acquired the capacities that make such autonomy possible. Most do not permit a four-year-old to determine whether he ought to undergo surgery (although some suggest we should), when to cross a busy road, or whether we should spend his education budget on sweets. His dependence is not incidental but constitutive of childhood.
All this is very obvious until one asks what follows from it.
If a child cannot reliably determine his own interests, then someone else must exercise judgment on his behalf. The parent becomes a temporary custodian of a person whose preferences, capacities and even values are still being formed. That creates an obvious danger. Parental authority can easily become paternalism without limits. The phrase “it is for your own good” has justified an enormous number of things which were not, in fact, good for the child. If dependency grants parents authority, why should it not grant them unlimited authority.
Perhaps the parent’s obligation is limited to preventing obvious harm. But why? Maybe because the parent is implicitly trying to preserve possibilities that the child is not yet capable of recognising, in this case the possibility of life and even a happy future. This is very close to Joel Feinberg’s idea of a child’s “right to an open future.” A child does not merely possess interests in the present. He is also the person who will later possess a much more developed set of interests, ambitions and preferences. The adult he becomes may be grateful that he was taught music, introduced to books, encouraged to travel, permitted to make mistakes, or exposed to ideas that he did not appreciate at the time. Equally, he may reasonably resent the fact that these possibilities were never made available to him.
But the child cannot necessarily demand these things in advance. A ten-year-old cannot tell his parent that he would like to preserve the future possibility of becoming a historian, a musician or an architect because he does not yet know that these possibilities exist in any meaningful sense. He does not possess enough information about the world or about himself to specify his future interests with confidence.
This is where Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach that distinguishes between needs and capabilities becomes useful. When evaluating economic development, he asks not merely what resources a person possesses but what they are actually capable of being and doing. That seems unusually appropriate to childhood. Coing back to our Two households where exactly the same amount of food, clothing, schooling and material security will cause two children to emerge with very different ranges of possibility.
If encouraged to question, explore and experiment. He may have been taken to museums, given books beyond his school syllabus, allowed to pursue obscure interests, introduced to different people and encouraged to discover what he actually enjoys. Another may have received all the legally and materially necessary components of a respectable childhood while being discouraged from anything that seemed impractical, inconvenient or unfamiliar to his parents.
The difference is not necessarily visible on the balance sheet. Yet it may become enormous later as one child has been given a wider set of capabilities from which to construct a life. The other may have been protected from deprivation but deprived of possibilities. It is therefore conceivable that the moral duty of a parent is not merely to keep the child healthy until adulthood but to enlarge the range of lives that the eventual adult can meaningfully choose between.
This also helps explain why parental attention can matter in a way that is difficult to describe through rights alone. A child does not simply need information. He needs someone to take his developing mind seriously enough to engage with it. There is a difference between telling a child that he is free to read any book in the house and actually noticing which books interest him, discussing them with him and allowing his curiosity to lead somewhere.
This is where an ethics of care thinkers become particularly relevant. Nel Noddings challenges the tendency to imagine morality as a collection of universal rules applied identically to autonomous individuals because Human beings do not encounter one another only as abstract strangers. We exist within relationships that generate particular obligations. A stranger may have a duty to help a child in immediate danger. A parent has something more demanding. The parent is not merely a person who happens to encounter the child. The parent occupies the relationship upon which the child’s life depends.
This is why I often feel deeply unsettled when parents say, “I have provided everything to which my child has a right, and therefore I have fulfilled my moral duty.” because the relationship itself creates obligations that cannot be reduced to enforceable rights.
But why only for children? Why does the relationship change the moral status of the act?
This distinction becomes clearer when one considers two adults. Suppose a friend asks you to spend an entire Saturday helping them learn an obscure skill that they have recently become interested in. You are permitted to refuse. It might be generous to agree, but your refusal does not usually make you an immoral person. Now imagine that your eight-year-old child asks you to spend the same afternoon helping him understand something he is fascinated by. It would seem cold to insist to him that your only duty is to provide food, shelter and education.
Maybe because the child is dependent upon you or because you voluntarily assumed the parental role. Perhaps because the child cannot obtain the same kind of care elsewhere. Or because there is something morally significant about being responsible for the development of a person who has been entrusted to you. Whatever the answer, the result is the same. Parenting seems to contain obligations that are not captured adequately by the language of rights.
There is, however, another problem. If we accept that parents ought to give children more than their basic rights entitle them to, how do we decide how much more? This is where equality quickly becomes confused with justice. Imagine one child needs considerably more attention than another because he is struggling academically, while his sibling is relatively independent. Giving both children precisely the same amount of time may be equal, but it may not be just. The more dependent child may reasonably require more resources.
Yet the situation can also be reversed. A parent who becomes entirely consumed by the needs of one child may neglect another. Parenting cannot be reduced to distributing an identical quantity of money, time or attention between children. And this is why it is often said that parenting is an art, for which there is no established guide.
There is another reason that the problem cannot be solved by rights alone. Children are not simply vulnerable recipients of care. They are future autonomous persons. Much of what a parent does is therefore preparation for the eventual withdrawal of parental authority.
The paradox of being a good parent is that must simultaneously exercise control and work toward making that control unnecessary. A parent tells a child what to do because the child cannot yet judge adequately. But the purpose of that authority is eventually to make the child capable of judging for himself. A parent restricts freedom in childhood partly so that the child can eventually possess the judgment necessary for freedom. This makes parenting a peculiar moral relationship. The parent is responsible for a person whose autonomy he must protect before that autonomy fully exists.
Kant’s insistence that human beings must be treated as ends rather than merely as means to an end becomes relevant here. It would be easy to treat a child as an object of parental ambition that many parents in Asia have been stereotyped to be predisposed to do. But to regard the child as an end means something more demanding. The child is not merely a project through which the parent can satisfy his own desires. His developing personality has value independently of what the parent wants him to become.
At the same time, the opposite mistake is possible. Treating the child as an end does not mean obeying every preference the child expresses. A six-year-old may passionately prefer to stay awake until three in the morning. Respecting his humanity does not require surrendering judgment to him. The point is not to treat the child as an autonomous adult before he is one. It is to exercise authority in a way that is ultimately directed toward the emergence of an autonomous person.
There is, I think, one more uncomfortable possibility here. Some of our intuitions about children may not be moral principles at all. Suppose two strangers, identical in every morally relevant respect except age, are drowning. One is a newborn child. The other is an elderly man. Assume, for the sake of argument, that only one can be saved. Many people would save the child immediately.
If we use our own reasoning, it may be because the child has more potential years of life ahead of him. Perhaps because he has not yet had the opportunity to experience life. Perhaps because his dependency makes his vulnerability seem more serious. But perhaps there is also a simpler explanation. Human beings are psychologically predisposed to protect infants. We find them vulnerable, helpless and emotionally salient. But as Mill clearly outlines in Utilitarianism just because our intuition points the needle in a certain direction that does not mean it is north.
This is one of the problems that the philosophy of utilitarianism exposes rather well. We often describe our decisions as just when what we really mean is that they feel right. The discomfort of examining our own intuitions comes from discovering that some moral judgments may be partly the product of emotion, social conditioning or biological predisposition.
This does not mean those intuitions are necessarily wrong. It would prefer that they undergo some justification first.
And the same applies to parental partiality. Almost every moral tradition recognises some reason for caring more for one’s own child than for a stranger. Peter Singer’s demanding form of utilitarianism makes this difficult by insisting that suffering matters independently of proximity or personal attachment. Yet ordinary morality seems to permit, and perhaps require, forms of partiality that would be suspicious elsewhere.
A parent who spends thousands of dollars enriching their own child’s education while another child lives in poverty may be criticised from an impartial perspective. But we rarely believe that a parent ought to abandon their own child’s interests whenever another child’s needs are greater.
Again that might be for several reasons, for example, special relationships create special obligations. But that does not solve the problem. It merely changes the question from “What does every human being deserve?” to “What does one particular person owe another because of the relationship between them?”
This may be the most important problem.
A stranger’s duty toward a child can reasonably be expressed in terms of universal rights. A parent’s duty cannot. The parent is responsible not merely for ensuring that the child is not deprived, but for participating in the construction of the person the child will become. This still does not imply that parents owe unlimited care. There must be some boundary between obligation and generosity. We do not ordinarily condemn a parent for failing to provide every possible enrichment, experience or opportunity. A child may benefit from piano lessons without possessing a moral right to them. A family holiday may contribute to flourishing without becoming a duty. Parents are allowed to have limits. That’s why I don’t think that parents owe children everything that might improve their lives. But children do possess legitimate moral claims that are not reducible to the prevention of deprivation.
Their vulnerability gives parents a responsibility to do more than maintain biological survival. Their incomplete autonomy creates a duty to cultivate autonomy. Their inability to understand their own future interests gives parents a responsibility to preserve an open future rather than prematurely narrowing it. And the relationship itself generates forms of attention and care that would be regarded as merely generous if performed by a stranger.
Perhaps, then, the moral imperative to care for a human being beyond their needs emerges most clearly when that human being cannot yet care for himself. The adult can, eventually, correct his own mistakes, seek opportunities, change environments and decide what matters to him. But children cannot. Aristotle wrote in The Republic about how the guardians ought to be trained as children as what they do then set a course for the rest of their lives and permeate deep into their character.
And perhaps that is the strongest argument for giving a child more than his rights strictly entitle him to. Rights tell us what we must not deny him. But parenting, at its best, may require preventing creating the conditions under which the child can one day decide for himself what a good life ought to be.
The difficult part is that no rule can tell a parent exactly what this requires. As previously stated, there is no universal number of hours of attention, no fixed quantity of freedom, no correct amount of money, and no formula for raising one child correctly.
But the obligation is very real and present, without being perfectly measurable. And perhaps that is why it is so easy to avoid discussing.