Children's rights and human development is a new and uncharted domain in human rights and psychology research. This multidisciplinary children's rights reader is a first attempt to introduce this domain to students and researchers of children's rights, child development, child maltreatment, family and child studies, and related fields. For many lawyers, children's rights are limited to their legal dimension: the norms and institutions of international human rights law, often with an exclusive focus on the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its monitoring treaty body, the Committee on the Rights of the Child. However, there are three more dimensions to children's rights. Children's rights share a moral and a political dimension with all human rights, which most non-international lawyers all too often overlook. And children's rights have a fourth dimension: the time dimension of child and human development. This time dimension is multidisciplinary in itself. Human development begins nine months before childbirth. When we are four years of age, our brain is 90% adult size. The infrastructure of our personality, health, and resilience is formed in our first years of life, determined by the quality and sheer quantity of parent-child interaction and secure attachment formation. Yet, more than one third of children are not securely attached. According to research published in The Lancet in 2009, one in ten children in high income countries is maltreated. Violence against children is a worldwide plague. Socio-economic and socio-emotional deprivation are still transmitted from generation to generation in both rich and poor states. Investing in early childhood development, positive parenting, and child rights education makes sense. This book brings together substantial and fascinating texts from many fields and disciplines that illustrate and elaborate this point. Arranged in ten chapters titled according to pertinent child rights principles and concepts, these texts offer a state-of-the-art view of the enormous progress made in the past decades in several fields of human knowledge. In between these texts, several news and factual items inform the reader on the huge gap that still exists between what we know and what we do to make this world a better place for children, to promote human development, and to protect human rights better. Child rights violations are still met with more rhetoric than leadership. But change is on its way. The book's contents may be used both as background readings and as tasks for group discussion in problem-based learning or other educational settings in child rights law and psychology courses. It is also aimed at a broader academic and public audience interested in the many aspects and ramifications of children's rights and human development.

Human rights tend to focus on the relationship between the individual and the state the individual is the rights-holder, the state is the duty-holder. Children's rights bring a third player much more into the picture, namely the parents. Although, legally speaking, they are not duty-holders under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, parents do have a number of responsibilities under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other human rights instruments. Child rearing may still be considered by many to be within the private domain, i.e. a matter of concern only within the relationship between children and their parents, with the exception of instances of child abuse or neglect. However, States may be obligated to turn parental responsibilities into national legal duties if this is needed to improve the legal and social position of children. In this volume, child-rearing responsibilities are examined in the light of children's rights and other human rights. All the contributions focus in particular on the proposal to introduce an upbringing (or parenting) pledge. The upbringing pledge contains not only a statement of lasting commitment towards the child, but also an explicit declaration of commitment to respect and promote the rights of the child both as a person and as a human being who is utterly dependent upon parents for wellbeing and the development of his or her personality. By means of the upbringing pledge as a child rights-based social institution, the responsibilities of society and the state towards both parents and children are re-affirmed as well.

On November 20, 1989, the United Nations unanimously adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Therefore, November 20 has become a date which signals the recognition by the international community that children have developmental and autonomy rights as essential benchmarks for children themselves and for those responsible for their well-being and healthy development. However, as long as society, through international cooperation, lacks serious investment in child development, the rights of all children especially the rights of young children and children living in exceptionally difficult conditions are soft rights only. The emancipation of the young child and the rehabilitation and emancipation of those who are deprived, exploited, abused, and neglected remain in a legal shadowland. This book explores this legal shadowland, introducing the concepts of the 'Trias pedagogica' and 'Transism, ' in order to shed light on the obligations and responsibilities of states and other actors in the empowerment of children, caregivers, and communities.