Taking Responsibility for Children

ONE: Raising Children: Who Is Responsible for What?

1 x ONE Raising Children: Who Is Responsible for What? COLIN M. MACLEOD Introduction Considerations of prudence and justice provide us with reasons to be concerned with the way children are raised. From a prudential point of view, it makes sense to ensure that children are raised to be self-reliant, productive members of society who can contribute to mutually beneficial forms of co-operation and interaction, and who are disposed to respect the rights of others. Poorly raised children are likely to impose undesirable costs on society, such as rights violations along with the costs of maintaining coercive enforcement mechanisms—police, courts, prisons, insurance—aimed at dealing with such problems. Considerations of justice provide even more compelling reasons to be concerned with the upbringing of children. Children have distinct interests that give rise to justice-based entitlements. Extending considerations of justice to children is partly a matter of ensuring that they are raised in a way that is respectful of their distinct justicebased entitlements. I shall assume in light of such considerations that we should accept the claim that every child is entitled to a decent upbringing. For the most part, I do not wish to explore the deep normative justification of this claim. Rather, I wish to examine how we should set about answering the two questions implied by the title of this chapter: (1) What sort of upbringing are children entitled to receive? (2) Who has responsibility for ensuring that children receive this upbringing? I suspect that crafting a satisfactory response to these questions may be more complex than is sometimes assumed. Many discussions about rearing children focus on delineating the special responsibilities that parents have. This focus on parental duties is understandable, but it is potentially misleading insofar as it conveys the impression that responsibilities for raising children well lie almost exclusively with parents. The African proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child,” reminds us that raising children is really a collective enterprise involving the coordinated efforts of many different people. In collective enterprises there are typically many different ways of allocating responsibility among agents for the achievement of ends. In the case of raising children, we need to know something about the appropriate objectives of raising children and who should assume responsibility for ensuring that these objectives are realized. Let me state the dimensions of the problem somewhat more formally. First, there is the entitlement problem. Addressing this problem involves identifying the key components in a decent upbringing and the kinds of resources, opportunities, protections, and nurturing children are entitled to receive. Second, there is a responsibility allocation problem. Here the challenge is to determine who should be assigned responsibility for ensuring that the various entitlement claims of children are met. This problem is, to an important degree, distinct from the entitlement problem because, in many cases, merely specifying a child’s entitlement is not suf- ficient to determine who has responsibility for ensuring its provision. For example, saying a child is entitled to nutritious food does not tell us who is responsible for providing food to the child. Sometimes, however, specification of an entitlement can uniquely determine the agent who has responsibility for ensuring the entitlement claim is met; for example, we might say that a child is entitled to the love of his/her parents. A solution to the entitlement problem will influence the solution to the allocation problem but it will not, typically, uniquely determine a solution. For most entitlements, there is a number of what might be termed “potential nurturing agents,” that is, persons or institutions that could be assigned responsibility for meeting a given entitlement claim. The allocation problem consists in determining the criteria that should be used to determine which potential nurturing agents have responsibility for meeting which entitlement claims. Implicit responses to both the entitlement and allocation problems are reflected in some common assumptions about child-rearing responsibilities . We tend to think that the degree of responsibility competent adult agents have (whether individually or collectively) for raising children is a function of the closeness of the relationship between children and adults. The factors that determine the overall closeness of the relationship between these potential nurturing agents and children are various, but they seem to 2 COLIN M. MACLEOD include factors such as: (a) biological relatedness, (b) familial ties, (c) culture , (d) language, (e) nationality, (f) shared political institutions, and...