It was widely reported last week that two philanthropic organisations, Atlantic Philanthropies and the One Foundation, have donated €1.5m to the Campaign for Children, an umbrella organisation set up to campaign in favour of changing the Constitution to include children’s rights. It’s an interesting development.

Bearing in mind what we know of the lives of many children, enshrining children’s rights in the Constitution seems entirely rational and right. But that won’t stop a raft of people from opposing it.
They’ll do so on familiar grounds. They’ll defend the family. They’ll say that the amendment will weaken the rights of parents and make it easier for social services to intervene in family situations.
What is less likely to be discussed is the notion of childhood itself and the degree to which it is socially constructed. I mean, what is a child anyway?
In Ireland as elsewhere, a person is legally a child up to the age of 18 (unless married). At that point, all the laws and structures regarding children cease to apply. While the legal age at which you can leave school is 16, you can drive a car at 17 and if you are a student you are still regarded as part of your family for means assessment up to 23, and so on, these are only minor variations.
But why 18? And why do people want to raise that age even further, for example as regards being able to buy alcohol? One fella recently wrote to the Irish Times suggesting 25!
At the time, there was much coverage of the retirement of the Director of the National Museum, Dr Pat Wallace. He’s the foremost expert on Viking excavations and could have told that letter writer that a thousand years ago, right before the Battle of Clontarf, many people didn’t live to see 25, and beer was drunk in most homes with breakfast, lunch and tea! This was because it was far safer than water at the time. It was also pretty weak, but you get my point.
There was also extensive coverage recently of the remarkable achievement by 16-year-old Dutch sailor Laura Dekker who sailed around the world solo.
Her endeavour had been resolutely opposed by Dutch social services. They referred to the law on school attendance, but the undercurrent was clearly an assumption that a child – or ‘child’ – shouldn’t be allowed undertake such a risky project. There may also have been a belief that her parents, in supporting her ambition, were irresponsible.
To the parents, she was and is a highly competent sailor, more than able to accomplish her goal, and the trip was an adventure that would be far more valuable than being in school… a kind of ultra-Transition Year project. To social services, it was high-risk and the law means what it says.
She got her way, thankfully. But in thinking about it, one again recalls the Vikings. A very high proportion of those seafaring warriors who rampaged up and down the Atlantic coasts of Europe a thousand years ago were of an age with Laura Dekker!
A number of things have happened in the interim, especially since the 1950s. While it’s tempting for some to point to the new set of protective services that came into being, two key drivers of change were work and education.
For over a century, the world of work has been demanding ever-higher qualifications levels. Nowadays, the Leaving Certificate is the most basic requirement for any but the most precarious employment — and most jobs demand more. This means people are in education longer — that is, they are dependent for longer. And because childhood tends to be equated with dependency, childhood has also lengthened.
The paradox is that biological childhood is actually growing shorter. The onset of puberty in economically and socially advanced countries is earlier than ever. So you have a growing gap between the end of biological childhood and the beginning of social and economic independence – that is, adulthood as traditionally understood.
It is little wonder that, as elsewhere, a large section of Irish society is out-of-sorts. This has been recognised by some academic researchers, especially in psychology, like Jeffrey Jensen Arnott and Robert Epstein.
A few years ago, Arnott spoke to a seminar organised by the Children’s Research Centre in Trinity on “Coming of Age in the 21st Century: The New and Longer Road to Adulthood”.
You can search it out yourself. Among the implications are that ‘emerging adults’ are not looking for a job or career for life, they are after an endless series of opportunities.
The trouble is, policy in education and work has not yet begun to accommodate new attitudes to work and new patterns of behaviour, despite them being part and parcel of many of the new industries we are so keen to embrace.
Epstein is perhaps more combative and focuses more on the Laura Dekkers of our world and on how systems trap young people in vacuous pursuits, isolated from adults and separated from their own competence.
In most important respects, he says, “teens are as competent as adults.” He adds that many cultures do not have a term for adolescence and that “the more young people are infantilised, the more psychopathology they show.”
All of which returns us to the referendum that is set to be held this year. There is a pressing reason to enshrine children’s rights in the Constitution. But we should talk about them and start to ddeal realistically with the maturity of people often described as ‘children’.
We should think about how Irish society, among others, limits and inhibits children and young people.
So, among the rights we might define for them should be the right to be independent and the right to sail around the world at 16 if we’re able to…