Children's and Adolescents' Understanding of Rights: Balancing Nurturance and Self‐Determination

Abstract

This study examined the development of young people's understanding of nurturance and self-determination rights. One hundred and sixty-nine participants from 5 age groups (8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 years of age) participated in a semistructured interview containing hypothetical vignettes, in which a story character wished to exercise a self-determination right or nurturance right that conflicted with the wishes or practices of those in authority. Participants were asked to decide if they would support the story character's request for rights and to justify their decisions. Younger children (8- to 12-year-olds) were significantly less likely to identify both nurturance and self-determination rights as salient than were older participants (14- to 16-year-olds). The types of reasoning participants exhibited for the two types of rights differed at all ages. Reasoning about nurturance rights did not show an age-related progression from concrete to abstract, whereas reasoning about self-determination rights was more likely to exhibit such a progression. Results suggest that previous attempts to explain the development of understanding of rights in terms of global stages does not fully capture children's and adolescents' reasoning, and, in particular, such a framework may not account for the differences in young people's thinking about the 2 types of rights.

British Adolescents’ and Young Adults’ Understanding and Reasoning About the Religious and Nonreligious Rights of Asylum‐Seeker Youth

“…As in previous research on children's and adolescents' attitudes toward children's rights (e.g., Cherney & Perry, 1996;Cherney & Shing, 2008;Ruck et al, 1998;Ruck et al, 2002), in the current study participants were more willing to endorse asylum-seeking adolescents' and emerging adults' nurturance than self-determination rights. Extending past research, the findings revealed that participants showed similar support for nonreligious nurturance rights and religious self-determination rights followed by somewhat less support for asylum-seeker children's religious nurturance rights.…”

“…In contrast to past research on young people's conceptions of rights (e.g., Helwig, 1995Helwig, , 1997Ruck et al, 1998;Ruck et al, 2002), fewer age-related differences emerged in terms of reasoning than in endorsements. In the current investigation, agerelated differences were only found with regard to the justifications pertaining to ''outcomes'' for religious nurturance and self-determination vignettes.…”

“…Specifically, we expected that religious rights would be less likely to be supported than nonreligious rights. Third, similar to studies documenting the multifaceted nature of young people's reasoning about nurturance and self-determination rights (e.g., Helwig, 1997Helwig, , 1998Ruck et al 1998;Ruck et al, 2002;Ruck et al, 2007), we expected that young people would refer to issues of responsibility and outcomes more for nurturance than self-determination situations. In contrast, we predicted that participants would make appeals to the individual's rights or personal choice more for self-determination than nurturance vignettes.…”

“…Age differences have been found fairly consistently when young people reason about their own rights (for a review, see Peterson-Badali & Ruck, 2008). In such studies, children tend to support nurturance more than selfdetermination rights when asked to reason about targets matched to them in age (Ruck, Tenenbaum, & Willenberg, 2011;Ruck et al, 1998). In addition, by early adolescence, young people support selfdetermination rights when thinking about individuals close to their own age (Day, Peterson-Badali, & Ruck, 2006;Peterson-Badali, Morine, Ruck, & Slonim, 2004).…”

“…Thus, with regard to thinking about rights, a domain approach would suggest that how children judge and reason about rights is influenced by both the type of right (nurturance or self-determination) and the context or situation in which the right is embedded. For example, using a domain model, Ruck and colleagues (e.g., Ruck, Abramovitch, & Keating, 1998;Ruck, Peterson-Badali, & Day, 2002) found that children and adolescents evaluate nurturance rights (e.g., the right to be cared for by parents) differently from self-determination rights (e.g., the right to personal decision making). When reasoning about nurturance rights, young people invoke considerations of parental responsibility and welfare concerns, whereas discussions of self-determination rights tend to correspond to issues of personal choice and autonomy (Helwig, 2006a(Helwig, , 2006b.…”