Frank Furedi has just posted this very perceptive and disturbing article on Spiked.com. I would like to hear a comment on it from Frances Fitzgerald (Irish Minister for Children). In it he says this:
“The unthinking and uncritical embrace of children’s rights since the 1970s has had a corrosive impact on community life. The promotion and cultural glorification of this right helped to de-legitimise the authority of the mother and father. ‘Regrettably, a leading characteristic of the children’s rights movement is the propensity to separate children’s interest from their parents’’, wrote Martin Guggenheim in his compelling study, What’s Wrong With Children’s Rights (1). Children’s rights do not empower children; rather, they disempower parents. They provide an ideological rationale for perceiving parent-child relations as fundamentally contradictory.
“Outwardly, the worldview of children’s liberation and that of the contemporary child-protection industry appear opposed to one another. Liberationists and PIE want to erode the distinction between childhood and adulthood, while the current child-saving lobby wants to keep adults out of the lives of children. These are temperamentally very different attitudes toward childhood. But what they share is a suspicion of parents and families. And what therefore binds these two different approaches is the assumption that the advocates of these approaches have the moral authority to decide what is in the best interests of other people’s children.”
The full story is here: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/what-pie-and-the-nspcc-have-in-common/14763#.UyS_WScgGSM