## 1. What is a Child?



Almost single-handedly, Philippe Aries, in his influential
book, *Centuries of Childhood* (Aries, 1962), made the
reading public aware that conceptions of childhood have varied across
the centuries. The very notion of a child, we now realize, is both
historically and culturally conditioned. But exactly how the
conception of childhood has changed historically and how conceptions
differ across cultures is a matter of scholarly controversy and
philosophical interest (see Kennedy, 2006). Thus Aries argued,
partly on the evidence of depictions of infants in medieval art, that
the medievals thought of children as simply "little
adults." Shulamith Shahar (1990), by contrast, finds evidence
that some medieval thinkers understood childhood to be divided into
fairly well-defined stages. And, whereas Piaget claims that his
subjects, Swiss children in the first half of the 20th Century, were
animistic in their thinking (Piaget, 1929), Margaret Mead (1967)
presents evidence that Pacific island children were not.



One reason for being skeptical about any claim of radical
discontinuity--at least in Western conceptions of
childhood--arises from the fact that, even today, the dominant
view of children embodies what we might call a broadly
"Aristotelian conception" of childhood. According to
Aristotle, there are four sorts of causality, one of which is Final
causality and another is Formal Causality. Aristotle thinks of the
Final Cause of a living organism as the function that organism
normally performs when it reaches maturity. He thinks of the Formal
Cause of the organism as the form or structure it normally has in
maturity, where that form or structure is thought to enable the
organism to perform its functions well. According to this conception,
a human child is an immature specimen of the organism type, human,
which, by nature, has the potentiality to develop into a mature
specimen with the structure, form, and function of a normal or
standard adult.



Many adults today have this broadly Aristotelian conception of
childhood without having actually read any of Aristotle. It informs
their understanding of their own relationship toward the children
around them. Thus they consider the fundamental responsibility they
bear toward their children to be the obligation to provide the kind of
supportive environment those children need to develop into normal
adults, with the biological and psychological structures in place
needed to perform the functions we assume that normal, standard adults
can perform.



Two modifications of this Aristotelian conception have been
particularly influential in the last century and a half. One is the
19th century idea that *ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny*
(Gould, 1977), that is, that the development of an individual
recapitulates the history and evolutionary development of the race, or
species (Spock, 1968, 229). This idea is prominent in Freud (1950) and
in the early writings of Jean Piaget (see, e.g. Piaget, 1933). Piaget,
however, sought in his later writings to explain the phenomenon of
recapitulation by appeal to general principles of structural change in
cognitive development (see, e.g., Piaget, 1968, 27).



The other modification is the idea that development takes places in
age-related stages of clearly identifiable *structural* change.
This idea can be traced back to ancient thinkers, for example the
Stoics (Turner and Matthews, 1998, 49). Stage theory is to be found in
various medieval writers (Shahar, 1990, 21-31) and, in the
modern period, most prominently in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's
highly influential work, *Emile* (1979). But it is Piaget who
first developed a highly sophisticated version of stage theory and
made it the dominant paradigm for conceiving childhood in the latter
part of the 20th Century (see, e.g., Piaget, 1971).



Matthews (2008, 2009), argues that a Piagetian-type stage theory of
development tends to support a "deficit conception" of
childhood, according to which the nature of the child is understood
primarily as a configuration of deficits--missing capacities that
normal adults have but children lack. This conception, he argues,
ignores or undervalues the fact that children are, for example, better
able to learn a second language, or paint an aesthetically worthwhile
picture, or conceive a philosophically interesting question, than
those same children will likely be able to do as adults. Moreover, it
restricts the range and value of relationships adults think they can
have with their children.



Broadly Aristotelian conceptions of childhood can have two further
problematic features. They may deflect attention away from thinking
about children with disabilities in favour of theorizing solely about
normally developing children (see Carlson 2010), and they may distract
philosophers from attending to the goods of childhood when they think
about the responsibilities adults have towards the children in their
care, encouraging focus only on care required to ensure that children
develop adult capacities.



How childhood is conceived is crucial for almost all the
philosophically interesting questions about children. It is also
crucial for questions about what should be the legal status of
children in society, as well as for the study of children in
psychology, anthropology, sociology, and many other fields.


## 2. Theories of Cognitive Development



Any well-worked out epistemology will provide at least the materials
for a theory of cognitive development in childhood. Thus, according to
Rene Descartes, a clear and distinct knowledge of the world can
be constructed from resources innate to the human mind (Descartes, PW,
131). John Locke, by contrast, maintains that the human mind begins as
a "white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas"
(Locke, EHC, 121). On this view all the "materials of reason and
knowledge" come from experience. Locke's denial of the
doctrine of innate ideas was, no doubt, directed specifically at
Descartes and the Cartesians. But it also implies a rejection of the
Platonic doctrine that learning is a recollection of previously known
Forms. Few theorists of cognitive development today find either the
extreme empiricism of Locke or the strong innatism of Plato or
Descartes completely acceptable.



Behaviorism has offered recent theorists of cognitive development a
way to be strongly empiricist without appealing to Locke's inner
theater of the mind. The behaviorist program was, however, dealt a
major setback when Noam Chomsky, in his review (1959) of
Skinner's *Verbal Behavior* (1957), argued successfully
that no purely behaviorist account of language-learning is possible.
Chomsky's alternative, a theory of Universal Grammar, which owes
some of its inspiration to Plato and Descartes, has made the idea of
innate language structures, and perhaps other cognitive structures as
well, seem a viable alternative to a more purely empiricist conception
of cognitive development.



It is, however, the work of Jean Piaget that has been most influential
on the way psychologists, educators, and even philosophers have come
to think about the cognitive development of children. Piaget's
early work, *The Child's Conception of the World* (1929),
makes especially clear how philosophically challenging the work of a
developmental psychologist can be. Although his project is always to
lay out identifiable stages in which children come to understand what,
say, causality or thinking or whatever is, the intelligibility of his
account presupposes that there are satisfactory responses to the
philosophical quandaries that topics like causality, thinking, and
life raise.



Take the concept of life. According to Piaget this concept is acquired
in four stages (Piaget, 1929, Chapter 6)


* First Stage: Life is assimilated to activity in general
* Second Stage: Life is assimilated to movement
* Third Stage: Life is assimilated to spontaneous movement
* Fourth Stage: Life is restricted to animals and plants



These distinctions are suggestive, but they invite much more
discussion than Piaget elicits from his child subjects. What is
required for movement to be spontaneous? Is a bear alive during
hibernation? We may suppose the Venus flytrap moves spontaneously. But
does it really? What about other plants? And then there is the
question of what Piaget can mean by calling the thinking of young
children "animistic," if, at their stage of cognitive
development, their idea of life is simply "assimilated to
activity in general."



Donaldson (1978) offers a psychological critique of Piaget on
cognitive development. A philosophical critique of Piaget's work
on cognitive development is to be found in Chapters 3 and 4 of
Matthews (1994). Interesting post-Piagetian work in cognitive
development includes Cary (1985), Wellman (1990), Flavel (1995),
Subbotsky (1996), and Gelman (2003).



Psychological research on concept formation has suggested that
children do not generally form concepts by learning necessary and
sufficient conditions for their application, but rather by coming to
use prototypical examples as reference guides. Thus a robin (rather,
of course, than a penguin) might be the child's prototype for
'bird'. The child, like the adult, might then be credited
with having the concept, bird, without the child's ever being
able to specify, successfully, necessary and sufficient conditions for
something to count as a bird. This finding seems to have implications
for the proper role and importance of conceptual analysis in
philosophy. It is also a case in which we should let what we come to
know about cognitive development in children help shape our
epistemology, rather than counting on our antecedently formulated
epistemology to shape our conception of cognitive development in
children (see Rosch and Lloyd, 1978, and Gelman, 2003).



Some developmental psychologists have recently moved away from the
idea that children are to be understood primarily as human beings who
lack the capacities adults of their species normally have. This change
is striking in, for example, the work of Alison Gopnik, who writes:
"Children aren't just defective adults, primitive grownups
gradually attaining our perfection and complexity. Instead, children
and adults are different forms of homo sapiens. They have very
different, though equally complex and powerful, minds, brains, and
forms of consciousness, designed to serve different evolutionary
functions" (Gopnik, 2009, 9). Part of this new respect for the
capacities of children rests on neuroscience and an increased
appreciation for the complexity of the brains of infants and young
children. Thus Gopnik writes: "Babies' brains are actually
more highly connected than adult brains; more neural pathways are
available to babies than adults." (11)


## 3. Theories of Moral Development



Many philosophers in the history of ethics have devoted serious
attention to the issue of moral development. Thus Plato, for example,
offers a model curriculum in his dialogue, *Republic*, aimed at
developing virtue in rulers. Aristotle's account of the logical
structure of the virtues in his *Nicomachean Ethics* provides a
scaffolding for understanding how moral development takes place. And
the Stoics (Turner and Matthews, 1998, 45-64) devoted special
attention to dynamics of moral development.



Among modern philosophers, it is again Rousseau (1762) who devotes the
most attention to issues of development. He offers a sequence of five
age-related stages through which a person must pass to reach moral
maturity: (i) infancy (birth to age 2); (ii) the age of sensation (3
to 12); (iii) the age of ideas (13 to puberty); (iv) the age of
sentiment (puberty to age 20); and (v) the age of marriage and social
responsibility (age 21 on). Although he allows that an adult may
effectively modify the behavior of children by explaining that bad
actions are those that will bring punishment (1762 [1979, 90]), he
insists that genuinely moral reasoning will not be appreciated until
the age of ideas, at 13 and older. In keeping with his stage theory of
moral development he explicitly rejects Locke's maxim,
'Reason with children' (Locke, JLE), on the ground that
attempting to reason with a child younger than thirteen years of age
is developmentally inappropriate.



However, the cognitive theory of moral development formulated by
Piaget in *The Moral Judgment of the Child* (1965) and the
somewhat later theory of Lawrence Kohlberg (1981, 1984) are the ones
that have had most influence on psychologists, educators, and even
philosophers. Thus, for example, what John Rawls has to say about
children in his classic work, *A Theory of Justice* (1971)
rests heavily on the work of Piaget and Kohlberg.



Kohlberg presents a theory according to which morality develops in
approximately six stages, though according to his research, few adults
actually reach the fifth or sixth stages. In this respect
Kohlberg's theory departs from classic stage theory, as in
Piaget, since the sequence of stages does not culminate in the
capacity shared by normal adults. However, Kohlberg maintained that no
one skips a stage or regresses to an earlier stage. Although Kohlberg
sometimes considered the possibility of a seventh or eighth stage,
these are his basic six: the premoral (the 1st involving punishment
and obedience, and the 2nd naive hedonism), the morality of
conventional role conformity (the 3rd involving seeking good
relations, the 4th maintaining authority) and the morality of accepted
principles (the 5th involving the morality of contract, individual
rights and accepted law, the 6th individual principles of conscience).
  

  

Kohlberg developed a test, which has been widely used, to determine
the stage of any individual at any given time. The test requires
responses to ethical dilemmas and is to be scored by consulting an
elaborate manual.



One of the most influential critiques of the Kohlberg theory is to be
found in Carol Gilligan's *In a Different Voice* (1982).
Gilligan argues that Kohlberg's rule-oriented conception of
morality has an orientation toward justice, which she associates with
stereotypically male thinking, whereas women and girls are perhaps
more likely to approach moral dilemmas with a "care"
orientation. One important issue in moral theory that the
Kohlberg-Gilligan debate raises is that of the role and importance of
moral feelings in the moral life (see the entry on
 feminist ethics).



Another line of approach to moral development is to be found in the
work of Martin Hoffman (1982). Hoffman describes the development of
empathetic feelings and responses in four stages. Hoffman's
approach allows one to appreciate the possibility of genuine moral
feelings, and so of genuine moral agency, in a very small child. By
contrast, Kohlberg's moral-dilemma tests will assign
pre-schoolers and even early elementary-school children to a pre-moral
level.



A philosophically astute and balanced assessment of the
Kohlberg-Gilligan debate, with appropriate attention to the work of
Martin Hoffman, can be found in Pritchard (1991). See also Friedman
(1987), Likona (1976), Kagan and Lamb (1987), and Pritchard
(1996).



While much of the discussion of children's moral development has
occurred within psychology, some recent philosophical work on the
topic has emerged, with a particular focus on questions about whether
children can be held resposible for either or both of morally
praiseworthy actions and those that would be considered morally
blameworthy if performed by adults (Burroughs 2020, Tiboris 2014).


## 4. Children's Rights



For a full discussion of children's interests and
children's rights see the entry on the
 rights of children.


## 5. Childhood Agency and Autonomy



Clearly children are capable of goal-directed behavior while still
relatively young, and are agents in this minimal sense. Respect for
children's agency is provided in legal and medical contexts, in
that children who are capable of expressing their preferences are
frequently consulted, even if their views are not regarded as decisive
for determining outcomes.



The exercise of childhood agency will obviously be constrained by
social and political factors, including various dependency relations,
some of them imposed by family structures. Whether there are special
ethical rules and considerations that pertain to the family in
particular, and, if so, what these rules or considerations are, is the
subject of an emerging field we can call 'family ethics'
(Baylis and McLeod 2014, Blustein, 1982, Brighouse and Swift 2014,
Houlgate, 1980, 1999).



The idea that, in child-custody cases, the preferences of a child
should be given consideration, and not just the "best
interest" of the child, is beginning to gain acceptance in the
U.S., Canada and Europe. "Gregory K," who at age 12 was
able to speak rationally and persuasively to support his petition for
new adoptive parents, made a good case for recognizing childhood
agency in a family court. (See "Gregory Kingsley" in the
Other Internet Resources.) Less dramatically, in divorce proceedings,
older children are routinely consulted for their views about proposed
arrangements for their custody.



Perhaps the most wrenching cases in which adults have come to let
children play a significant role in deciding their own future are
those that involve treatment decisions for children with terminal
illnesses. (Kopelman and Moskop, 1989) The pioneering work of Myra
Bluebond-Langner shows how young children can come to terms with their
own imminent death and even conspire, mercifully, to help their
parents and caregivers avoid having to discuss this awful truth with
them (Bluebond-Langner, 1980).



While family law and medical ethics are domains in which children
capable of expressing preferences are increasingly encouraged to do
so, there remains considerable controversy within philosophy as to the
kind of authority that should be given to children's
preferences. There is widespread agreement that most children's
capacity to eventually become autonomous is morally important and that
adults who interact with them have significant responsibility to
ensure that this capacity is nurtured (Feinberg 1980). At the same
time it is typical for philosophers to be skeptical about the capacity
for children under the age of ten to have any capacity for autonomy,
either because they are judged not to care stably about anything
(Oshana 2005, Schapiro 1999), lack information, experience and
cognitive maturity (Levinson 1999, Ross 1998), or are too poor at
critical reflection (Levinson 1999).



Mullin (2007, 2014) argues that consideration of children's
capacity for autonomy should operate with a relatively minimal
understanding of autonomy as self-governance in the service of what
the person cares about (with the objects of care conceived broadly to
include principles, relationships, activities and things).
Children's attachment to those they love (including their
parents) can therefore be a source of autonomy. When a person, adult
or child, acts autonomously, he or she finds the activity meaningful
and embraces the goal of the action. This contrasts both with a lack
of motivation and with feeling pressured by others to achieve outcomes
desired by them. Autonomy in this sense requires capacities for
impulse control, caring stably about some things, connecting
one's goals to one's actions, and confidence that one can
achieve at least some of one's goals by directing one's
actions. It does not require extensive ability to engage in critical
self-reflection, or substantive independence. The ability to act
autonomously in a particular domain will depend, however, on whether
one's relationships with others are autonomy supporting. This is
in keeping with feminist work on relational autonomy. See the entry on
 Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy.



The orthodox position that children are paradigmatic examples of a
lack of autonomy has begun to change as more philosophers argue that
even children far from the cusp of adulthood may be capable of acting
autonomously in some areas of their lives (Bou-Habib and Olsaretti
2104, Hannan 2018a, Mullin 2007, 2014). However, others argue that
even when children have capacities like those possessed by adults,
societies shold protect children rather than deferring to their
autonomy when children's decisions might lead to very negative
consequences for them (Betzler 2022, Claassen and Anderson 2012,
Franklin-Hall 2013).



Children's autonomy is supported when adults give them relevant
information, reasons for their requests, demonstrate interest in
children's feelings and perspectives, and offer children
structured choices that reflect those thoughts and feelings. Support
for children's autonomy in particular domains of action is
perfectly consistent with adults behaving paternalistically toward
them at other times and in other domains, when children are
ill-informed, extremely impulsive, do not appreciate the long-term
consequences of their actions, cannot recognize what is in their
interest, cannot direct their actions to accord with their interests,
or are at risk of significant harm (Mullin 2014).


## 6. The Goods (and Bads?) of Childhood



"Refrigerator art," that is, the paintings and drawings of
young children that parents display on the family's
refrigerator, is emblematic of adult ambivalence toward the
productions of childhood. Typically, parents are pleased with, and
proud of, the art their children produce. But equally typically,
parents do not consider the artwork of their children to be good
without qualification. Yet, as Jonathan Fineberg has pointed out
(Fineberg, 1997, 2006), several of the most celebrated artists of the
20th century collected child art and were inspired by it. It may be
that children are more likely as children to produce art, the
aesthetic value of which a famous artist or an art historian can
appreciate, than they will be able to later as adults.



According to what we have called the "Aristotelian
conception", childhood is an essentially prospective state. On
such a view, the value of what a child produces cannot be expected to
be good in itself, but only good for helping the child to develop into
a good adult. Perhaps some child art is a counterexample to this
expectation. Of course, one could argue that adults who, as children,
were encouraged to produce art, as well as make music and excel at
games, are more likely to be flourishing adults than those who are not
encouraged to give such "outlets" to their energy and
creativity. But the example of child art should at least make one
suspicious of Michael Slote's claim that "just as dreams
are discounted except as they affect (the waking portions of) our
lives, what happens in childhood principally affects our view of total
lives through the effects that childhood success or failure are
supposed to have on mature individuals" (Slote, 1983, 14).



Recent philosophical work on the goods of childhood (Brennan 2014,
Gheaus 2014, Macleod 2010) stresses that childhood should not be
evaluated solely insofar as it prepares the child to be a fully
functioning adult. Instead, a good childhood is of intrinsic and not
merely instrumental value. Different childhoods that equally prepare
children to be capable adults may be better or worse, depending on how
children fare qua children. Goods potentially specific to childhood
(or, more likely, of greatest importance during childhood) include
opportunities for joyful and unstructured play and social
interactions, lack of significant responsibility, considerable free
time, and innocence, particularly sexual innocence. Play, for
instance, can be of considerable value not only as a means for
children to acquire skills and capacities they will need as adults,
but also for itself, during childhood.



Even more recently, some philosophers (Hannan 2018b, Hannan and Leland
2018) have questioned whether there are features of childhood that
make childhood bad for children. Candidate bad-making features include
children's impaired practical identity, their being
asymmetrically physically and emotionally vulnerable to their parents
and needing extensive control by them, and their lack of a fixed
practical identity. Any evaluation of features that are particularly
valuable in childhood, and either uniquely or more easily accessed in
childhood, should be balanced against consideration of features that
make it a worse stage of life than adulthood. Bad-making features of
childhood may be traced either to aspects of childhood that cannot be
changed or to contingent social arrangements that may leave children
vulnerable to abuse or neglect at the hands of their intimate
caregivers, without much opportunity for recourse.


## 7. Philosophical Thinking in Children



For a full discussion of this topic see the entry on
 Philosophy for Children.


## 8. Moral Status of Children



It is uncontroversial to judge that what Mary Anne Warren terms
paradigmatic humans have moral status (Warren 1992). Paradigmatic
humans are adults with relatively standard cognitive capacities for
self-control, self-criticism, self-direction, and rational thought,
and are capable of moral thought and action. However, the grounds for
this status are controversial, and different grounds for moral status
have direct implications for the moral status of children. Jan
Narveson (1988), for instance, argues that children do not have moral
status in their own right because only free rational beings, capable
of entering into reciprocal relations with one another, have
fundamental rights. While Narveson uses the language of rights in his
discussion of moral status (people have direct moral duties only to
rights holders on his account), moral status need not be discussed in
the language of rights. Many other philosophers recognize children as
having moral status because of their potential to become paradigmatic
humans without committing to children having rights. For instance,
Allen Wood writes: "it would show contempt for rational nature
to be indifferent to its potentiality in children." (Wood 1998,
198)



When children are judged to have moral status because of their
potential to develop the capacities of paradigmatic adults (we might
call these paradigmatic children), this leaves questions about the
moral status of those children who are not expected to live to
adulthood, and those children whose significant intellectual
disabilities compromise their ability to acquire the capacities of
paradigmatic adults. There are then three common approaches that grant
moral status to non-paradigmatic children (and other non-paradigmatic
humans). The first approach deems moral consideration to track species
membership. On this approach all human children have moral status
simply because they are human (Kittay 2005). This approach has been
criticized as being inappropriately speciesist, especially by animal
rights activists. The second approach gives moral status to children
because of their capacity to fare well or badly, either on
straightforwardly utilitarian grounds or because they have subjective
experiences (Dombrowski 1997). It has been criticized by some for
failing to distinguish between capacities all or almost all human
children have that are not also possessed by other creatures who feel
pleasure and pain. The third approach gives moral status to
non-paradigmatic children because of the interests others with moral
status take in them (Sapontzis 1987), or the relationships they have
with them (Kittay 2005). Jaworska and Tannenbaum (2018) offer a
more recent version of such an account by arguing that children who
are human and raised in a person-rearing manner have moral status.



Sometimes the approaches may be combined. For instance, Warren writes
that young children and other non-paradigmatic humans have moral
status for two sorts of reasons: "their rights are based not
only on the value which they themselves place upon their lives and
well-being, but also on the value which other human beings place on
them." (1992. 197) In addition to these three most common
approaches, Mullin (2011) develops a fourth: some non-paradigmatic
children (and adults) have moral status not simply because others
value them but because they are themselves capable of being active
participants in morally valuable relationships with others. These
relationships express care for others beyond their serving as means
for one's own satisfaction. Approaches to moral status that
emphasize children's capacity to care for others in morally
valuable relationships also raise interesting questions about
children's moral responsibilities within those relationships
(see Mullin 2010).



For more on this topic see the entry on the
 grounds of moral status.


## 9. Other Issues



The topics discussed above hardly exhaust the philosophy of childhood.
Thus, we have said nothing about, for example, philosophical
literature on personhood as it bears on questions about the morality
of abortion, or bioethical discussions about when it is appropriate
for parents to consent to children's participation in medical
research or refuse medical treatment of their children. There has been
increasing attention in recent years to questions about the
appropriate limits of parental authority over children, about the
source and extent of parents and the state's responsibilities
for children, and about the moral permissibility of parents devoting
substantial resources to advancing the life prospects of their
children. These and many other topics concerning children may be
familiar to philosophers as they get discussed in other contexts,
particularly within family ethics and bioethics. Discussing them under
the rubric, 'philosophy of childhood,' as well in the
other contexts, may help us see connections between them and other
philosophical issues concerning children.