Mainstream ethical philosophy has had little to say about issues of family justice. 1 Even feminist moral theories often focus more on questions of justice for families than on questions of justice within them. 2 In contrast, there is a large body of literature on children's rights in sociology and legal theory. But little of this theorizing rests on a foundation in moral philosophy any stronger than a vague appeal to the notion of the best interests of the child. This paper is an attempt to provide a philosophical foundation for thinking about the moral status of children. It is driven by what we think are widespread convictions about how we ought to treat children—convictions that we share. 3 In part, we hope to develop a theory that accords with and justifies our moral convictions and the public policies we favor. However, we intend to do more than merely clarify our own intuitions. Not only will we begin to construct philosophical foundations for the approach to children's issues that we advocate, but we will also stake out various possible ways of arguing for those foundations. In addition, we will begin to apply the philosophical theory that we develop to moral and public policy issues about parenting, adoption, and foster care. The paper, then, has three parts. In the first, we propose several plausible claims that place constraints on theorizing about the moral status of children. We think that these claims constitute an attractive commonsense understanding of children's moral status. However, the three claims appear to be inconsistent. And if the three claims do capture a commonsense picture of the moral status of children, then that picture would seem to be inconsistent as well. In the second part of the paper, we offer a rights-based theory of the moral status of children that, we claim, both meets the