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Brian Morgan looks at lessons for social workers from health research on the competence of children to make decisions for themselves.

Research at Teesside University on children's rights published this year in the Journal of Advanced Nursing should be of considerable interest to social workers as well as its intended readership.

The paper tackles children's rights ostensibly to inform the health practitioner. But the author's widely read analysis in this complex area ought also to make social work practitioners think very hard about what is "in the best interests" of looked-after children. She suggests a radical reassessment of the capacity of many children who have experienced adversity to make competent decisions for themselves.

Ideas of childhood are changing, and recent formative events have been the ratification (1989) by the UK of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Children Act 1989 and the Human Rights Act 1998. The Children Act introduces the concept that "the child's welfare is paramount". But the report reminds us that this act was drafted by adults with their own definition of what is in a child's best interests.

There are adult "prejudices" about children's abilities and there are frictions between two opposing viewpoints - protectionist and liberationist. Liberationists are criticised for neglecting protection, protectionists for assuming all young children are incompetent.

Lowden argues that adults must develop a more pragmatic ideology concerning children's competence to make decisions for themselves. For example, the idea that childhood is a series of stages implying the crossing of boundaries of increasing levels of competence is being challenged.

There are no hard and fast "transitions". Writing in 2000, David Buckingham said that children growing up in the electronic age "will only be able to become competent if they are treated as though they are competent."¹

The author does not go as far as more forceful children's rights campaigners have done in the past. For example, Cathy McCulloch from the International Children's Parliament once suggested: "….that children's rights were an anathema to many adults….. many people viewing children as a threat and a problem…. and unsure of how to communicate with children."²

Importantly, children's life experiences equip some differently from others, the report explains. It includes case studies of children with chronic illnesses having knowledge and ability superior to their chronological age: "…. they grow up quickly, and greater credit should be given to their advanced maturity".

It is possible that social workers might see this kind of relatively more advanced maturity in children who have experienced being in care.

- J Lowden, "Children's Rights: a Decade of Dispute", Journal of Advanced Nursing, Vol 37(1), 2002

Brian Morgan is a freelance journalist specialising in medical and social care issues

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References

¹ D Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media, Polity Press, 2000

² C McCulloch, Seminar - Children & the Human Rights Act, Scottish Human Rights Trust, September 1999, see www.scotrights.org/events/children.htm#mcc