The philosophy of childhood has recently come to be recognized as anarea of inquiry analogous to the philosophy of science, the philosophyof history, the philosophy of religion, and the many other“philosophy of” subjects that are already consideredlegitimate areas of philosophical study. In addition, philosophicalstudy of related topics (such as parental rights, duties andresponsibilities) has flourished in recent years. The philosophy ofchildhood takes up philosophically interesting questions aboutchildhood, changing conceptions over time about childhood andattitudes toward children; theories of cognitive and moraldevelopment; children’s interests and children’s rights,the goods of childhood; children and autonomy; the moral status ofchildren and the place of children in society. As an academic subject,the philosophy of childhood is sometimes included within thephilosophy of education (e.g., Siegel, 2009). Recently, however,philosophers have begun to offer college and university coursesspecifically in the philosophy of childhood. And philosophicalliterature on childhood, parenting and families is increasing in bothquantity and quality.

• 1. What is a Child?
• 2. Theories of Cognitive Development
• 3. Theories of Moral Development
• 4. Children’s Rights
• 5. Childhood Agency and Autonomy
• 6. The Goods (and Bads?) of Childhood
• 7. Philosophical Thinking in Children
• 8. Moral Status of Children
• 9. Other Issues
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. What is a Child?

Almost single-handedly, Philippe Ariès, in his influentialbook,Centuries of Childhood (Ariès, 1962), made thereading public aware that conceptions of childhood have varied acrossthe centuries. The very notion of a child, we now realize, is bothhistorically and culturally conditioned. But exactly how theconception of childhood has changed historically and how conceptionsdiffer across cultures is a matter of scholarly controversy andphilosophical interest (see Kennedy, 2006). Thus Ariès argued,partly on the evidence of depictions of infants in medieval art, thatthe medievals thought of children as simply “littleadults.” Shulamith Shahar (1990), by contrast, finds evidencethat some medieval thinkers understood childhood to be divided intofairly well-defined stages. And, whereas Piaget claims that hissubjects, Swiss children in the first half of the 20th Century, wereanimistic in their thinking (Piaget, 1929), Margaret Mead (1967)presents evidence that Pacific island children were not.

One reason for being skeptical about any claim of radicaldiscontinuity—at least in Western conceptions ofchildhood—arises from the fact that, even today, the dominantview of children embodies what we might call a broadly“Aristotelian conception” of childhood. According toAristotle, there are four sorts of causality, one of which is Finalcausality and another is Formal Causality. Aristotle thinks of theFinal Cause of a living organism as the function that organismnormally performs when it reaches maturity. He thinks of the FormalCause of the organism as the form or structure it normally has inmaturity, where that form or structure is thought to enable theorganism to perform its functions well. According to this conception,a human child is an immature specimen of the organism type, human,which, by nature, has the potentiality to develop into a maturespecimen with the structure, form, and function of a normal orstandard adult.

Many adults today have this broadly Aristotelian conception ofchildhood without having actually read any of Aristotle. It informstheir understanding of their own relationship toward the childrenaround them. Thus they consider the fundamental responsibility theybear toward their children to be the obligation to provide the kind ofsupportive environment those children need to develop into normaladults, with the biological and psychological structures in placeneeded to perform the functions we assume that normal, standard adultscan perform.

Two modifications of this Aristotelian conception have beenparticularly influential in the last century and a half. One is the19th century idea thatontogeny recapitulates phylogeny(Gould, 1977), that is, that the development of an individualrecapitulates the history and evolutionary development of the race, orspecies (Spock, 1968, 229). This idea is prominent in Freud (1950) andin the early writings of Jean Piaget (see, e.g. Piaget, 1933). Piaget,however, sought in his later writings to explain the phenomenon ofrecapitulation by appeal to general principles of structural change incognitive development (see, e.g., Piaget, 1968, 27).

The other modification is the idea that development takes places inage-related stages of clearly identifiablestructural change.This idea can be traced back to ancient thinkers, for example theStoics (Turner and Matthews, 1998, 49). Stage theory is to be found invarious medieval writers (Shahar, 1990, 21–31) and, in themodern period, most prominently in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’shighly influential work,Emile (1979). But it is Piaget whofirst developed a highly sophisticated version of stage theory andmade it the dominant paradigm for conceiving childhood in the latterpart of the 20th Century (see, e.g., Piaget, 1971).

Matthews (2008, 2009), argues that a Piagetian-type stage theory ofdevelopment tends to support a “deficit conception” ofchildhood, according to which the nature of the child is understoodprimarily as a configuration of deficits—missing capacities thatnormal adults have but children lack. This conception, he argues,ignores or undervalues the fact that children are, for example, betterable to learn a second language, or paint an aesthetically worthwhilepicture, or conceive a philosophically interesting question, thanthose same children will likely be able to do as adults. Moreover, itrestricts the range and value of relationships adults think they canhave with their children.

Broadly Aristotelian conceptions of childhood can have two furtherproblematic features. They may deflect attention away from thinkingabout children with disabilities in favour of theorizing solely aboutnormally developing children (see Carlson 2010), and they may distractphilosophers from attending to the goods of childhood when they thinkabout the responsibilities adults have towards the children in theircare, encouraging focus only on care required to ensure that childrendevelop adult capacities.

How childhood is conceived is crucial for almost all thephilosophically interesting questions about children. It is alsocrucial for questions about what should be the legal status ofchildren in society, as well as for the study of children inpsychology, anthropology, sociology, and many other fields.

2. Theories of Cognitive Development

Any well-worked out epistemology will provide at least the materialsfor a theory of cognitive development in childhood. Thus, according toRené Descartes, a clear and distinct knowledge of the world canbe constructed from resources innate to the human mind (Descartes, PW,131). John Locke, by contrast, maintains that the human mind begins asa “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas”(Locke, EHC, 121). On this view all the “materials of reason andknowledge” come from experience. Locke’s denial of thedoctrine of innate ideas was, no doubt, directed specifically atDescartes and the Cartesians. But it also implies a rejection of thePlatonic doctrine that learning is a recollection of previously knownForms. Few theorists of cognitive development today find either theextreme empiricism of Locke or the strong innatism of Plato orDescartes completely acceptable.

Behaviorism has offered recent theorists of cognitive development away to be strongly empiricist without appealing to Locke’s innertheater of the mind. The behaviorist program was, however, dealt amajor setback when Noam Chomsky, in his review (1959) ofSkinner’sVerbal Behavior (1957), argued successfullythat no purely behaviorist account of language-learning is possible.Chomsky’s alternative, a theory of Universal Grammar, which owessome of its inspiration to Plato and Descartes, has made the idea ofinnate language structures, and perhaps other cognitive structures aswell, seem a viable alternative to a more purely empiricist conceptionof cognitive development.

It is, however, the work of Jean Piaget that has been most influentialon the way psychologists, educators, and even philosophers have cometo think about the cognitive development of children. Piaget’searly work,The Child’s Conception of the World (1929),makes especially clear how philosophically challenging the work of adevelopmental psychologist can be. Although his project is always tolay out identifiable stages in which children come to understand what,say, causality or thinking or whatever is, the intelligibility of hisaccount presupposes that there are satisfactory responses to thephilosophical quandaries that topics like causality, thinking, andlife raise.

Take the concept of life. According to Piaget this concept is acquiredin four stages (Piaget, 1929, Chapter 6)

• First Stage: Life is assimilated to activity in general
• Second Stage: Life is assimilated to movement
• Third Stage: Life is assimilated to spontaneous movement
• Fourth Stage: Life is restricted to animals and plants

These distinctions are suggestive, but they invite much morediscussion than Piaget elicits from his child subjects. What isrequired for movement to be spontaneous? Is a bear alive duringhibernation? We may suppose the Venus flytrap moves spontaneously. Butdoes it really? What about other plants? And then there is thequestion of what Piaget can mean by calling the thinking of youngchildren “animistic,” if, at their stage of cognitivedevelopment, their idea of life is simply “assimilated toactivity in general.”

Donaldson (1978) offers a psychological critique of Piaget oncognitive development. A philosophical critique of Piaget’s workon cognitive development is to be found in Chapters 3 and 4 ofMatthews (1994). Interesting post-Piagetian work in cognitivedevelopment includes Cary (1985), Wellman (1990), Flavel (1995),Subbotsky (1996), and Gelman (2003).

Psychological research on concept formation has suggested thatchildren do not generally form concepts by learning necessary andsufficient conditions for their application, but rather by coming touse prototypical examples as reference guides. Thus a robin (rather,of course, than a penguin) might be the child’s prototype for‘bird’. The child, like the adult, might then be creditedwith having the concept, bird, without the child’s ever beingable to specify, successfully, necessary and sufficient conditions forsomething to count as a bird. This finding seems to have implicationsfor the proper role and importance of conceptual analysis inphilosophy. It is also a case in which we should let what we come toknow about cognitive development in children help shape ourepistemology, rather than counting on our antecedently formulatedepistemology to shape our conception of cognitive development inchildren (see Rosch and Lloyd, 1978, and Gelman, 2003).

Some developmental psychologists have recently moved away from theidea that children are to be understood primarily as human beings wholack the capacities adults of their species normally have. This changeis striking in, for example, the work of Alison Gopnik, who writes:“Children aren’t just defective adults, primitive grownupsgradually attaining our perfection and complexity. Instead, childrenand adults are different forms of homo sapiens. They have verydifferent, though equally complex and powerful, minds, brains, andforms of consciousness, designed to serve different evolutionaryfunctions” (Gopnik, 2009, 9). Part of this new respect for thecapacities of children rests on neuroscience and an increasedappreciation for the complexity of the brains of infants and youngchildren. Thus Gopnik writes: “Babies’ brains are actuallymore highly connected than adult brains; more neural pathways areavailable to babies than adults.” (11)

3. Theories of Moral Development

Many philosophers in the history of ethics have devoted seriousattention to the issue of moral development. Thus Plato, for example,offers a model curriculum in his dialogue,Republic, aimed atdeveloping virtue in rulers. Aristotle’s account of the logicalstructure of the virtues in hisNicomachean Ethics provides ascaffolding for understanding how moral development takes place. Andthe Stoics (Turner and Matthews, 1998, 45–64) devoted specialattention to dynamics of moral development.

Among modern philosophers, it is again Rousseau (1762) who devotes themost attention to issues of development. He offers a sequence of fiveage-related stages through which a person must pass to reach moralmaturity: (i) infancy (birth to age 2); (ii) the age of sensation (3to 12); (iii) the age of ideas (13 to puberty); (iv) the age ofsentiment (puberty to age 20); and (v) the age of marriage and socialresponsibility (age 21 on). Although he allows that an adult mayeffectively modify the behavior of children by explaining that badactions are those that will bring punishment (1762 [1979, 90]), heinsists that genuinely moral reasoning will not be appreciated untilthe age of ideas, at 13 and older. In keeping with his stage theory ofmoral development he explicitly rejects Locke’s maxim,‘Reason with children’ (Locke, JLE), on the ground thatattempting to reason with a child younger than thirteen years of ageis developmentally inappropriate.

However, the cognitive theory of moral development formulated byPiaget inThe Moral Judgment of the Child (1965) and thesomewhat later theory of Lawrence Kohlberg (1981, 1984) are the onesthat have had most influence on psychologists, educators, and evenphilosophers. Thus, for example, what John Rawls has to say aboutchildren in his classic work,A Theory of Justice (1971)rests heavily on the work of Piaget and Kohlberg.

Kohlberg presents a theory according to which morality develops inapproximately six stages, though according to his research, few adultsactually reach the fifth or sixth stages. In this respectKohlberg’s theory departs from classic stage theory, as inPiaget, since the sequence of stages does not culminate in thecapacity shared by normal adults. However, Kohlberg maintained that noone skips a stage or regresses to an earlier stage. Although Kohlbergsometimes considered the possibility of a seventh or eighth stage,these are his basic six: the premoral (the 1st involving punishmentand obedience, and the 2nd naive hedonism), the morality ofconventional role conformity (the 3rd involving seeking goodrelations, the 4th maintaining authority) and the morality of acceptedprinciples (the 5th involving the morality of contract, individualrights and accepted law, the 6th individual principles of conscience).

Kohlberg developed a test, which has been widely used, to determinethe stage of any individual at any given time. The test requiresresponses to ethical dilemmas and is to be scored by consulting anelaborate manual.

One of the most influential critiques of the Kohlberg theory is to befound in Carol Gilligan’sIn a Different Voice (1982).Gilligan argues that Kohlberg’s rule-oriented conception ofmorality has an orientation toward justice, which she associates withstereotypically male thinking, whereas women and girls are perhapsmore likely to approach moral dilemmas with a “care”orientation. One important issue in moral theory that theKohlberg-Gilligan debate raises is that of the role and importance ofmoral feelings in the moral life (see the entry onfeminist ethics).

Another line of approach to moral development is to be found in thework of Martin Hoffman (1982). Hoffman describes the development ofempathetic feelings and responses in four stages. Hoffman’sapproach allows one to appreciate the possibility of genuine moralfeelings, and so of genuine moral agency, in a very small child. Bycontrast, Kohlberg’s moral-dilemma tests will assignpre-schoolers and even early elementary-school children to a pre-morallevel.

A philosophically astute and balanced assessment of theKohlberg-Gilligan debate, with appropriate attention to the work ofMartin Hoffman, can be found in Pritchard (1991). See also Friedman(1987), Likona (1976), Kagan and Lamb (1987), and Pritchard(1996).

While much of the discussion of children’s moral development hasoccurred within psychology, some recent philosophical work on thetopic has emerged, with a particular focus on questions about whetherchildren can be held resposible for either or both of morallypraiseworthy actions and those that would be considered morallyblameworthy if performed by adults (Burroughs 2020, Tiboris 2014).

4. Children’s Rights

For a full discussion of children’s interests andchildren’s rights see the entry on therights of children.

5. Childhood Agency and Autonomy

Clearly children are capable of goal-directed behavior while stillrelatively young, and are agents in this minimal sense. Respect forchildren’s agency is provided in legal and medical contexts, inthat children who are capable of expressing their preferences arefrequently consulted, even if their views are not regarded as decisivefor determining outcomes.

The exercise of childhood agency will obviously be constrained bysocial and political factors, including various dependency relations,some of them imposed by family structures. Whether there are specialethical rules and considerations that pertain to the family inparticular, and, if so, what these rules or considerations are, is thesubject of an emerging field we can call ‘family ethics’(Baylis and McLeod 2014, Blustein, 1982, Brighouse and Swift 2014,Houlgate, 1980, 1999).

The idea that, in child-custody cases, the preferences of a childshould be given consideration, and not just the “bestinterest” of the child, is beginning to gain acceptance in theU.S., Canada and Europe. “Gregory K,” who at age 12 wasable to speak rationally and persuasively to support his petition fornew adoptive parents, made a good case for recognizing childhoodagency in a family court. (See “Gregory Kingsley” in theOther Internet Resources.) Less dramatically, in divorce proceedings,older children are routinely consulted for their views about proposedarrangements for their custody.

Perhaps the most wrenching cases in which adults have come to letchildren play a significant role in deciding their own future arethose that involve treatment decisions for children with terminalillnesses. (Kopelman and Moskop, 1989) The pioneering work of MyraBluebond-Langner shows how young children can come to terms with theirown imminent death and even conspire, mercifully, to help theirparents and caregivers avoid having to discuss this awful truth withthem (Bluebond-Langner, 1980).

While family law and medical ethics are domains in which childrencapable of expressing preferences are increasingly encouraged to doso, there remains considerable controversy within philosophy as to thekind of authority that should be given to children’spreferences. There is widespread agreement that most children’scapacity to eventually become autonomous is morally important and thatadults who interact with them have significant responsibility toensure that this capacity is nurtured (Feinberg 1980). At the sametime it is typical for philosophers to be skeptical about the capacityfor children under the age of ten to have any capacity for autonomy,either because they are judged not to care stably about anything(Oshana 2005, Schapiro 1999), lack information, experience andcognitive maturity (Levinson 1999, Ross 1998), or are too poor atcritical reflection (Levinson 1999).

Mullin (2007, 2014) argues that consideration of children’scapacity for autonomy should operate with a relatively minimalunderstanding of autonomy as self-governance in the service of whatthe person cares about (with the objects of care conceived broadly toinclude principles, relationships, activities and things).Children’s attachment to those they love (including theirparents) can therefore be a source of autonomy. When a person, adultor child, acts autonomously, he or she finds the activity meaningfuland embraces the goal of the action. This contrasts both with a lackof motivation and with feeling pressured by others to achieve outcomesdesired by them. Autonomy in this sense requires capacities forimpulse control, caring stably about some things, connectingone’s goals to one’s actions, and confidence that one canachieve at least some of one’s goals by directing one’sactions. It does not require extensive ability to engage in criticalself-reflection, or substantive independence. The ability to actautonomously in a particular domain will depend, however, on whetherone’s relationships with others are autonomy supporting. This isin keeping with feminist work on relational autonomy. See the entry onFeminist Perspectives on Autonomy.

The orthodox position that children are paradigmatic examples of alack of autonomy has begun to change as more philosophers argue thateven children far from the cusp of adulthood may be capable of actingautonomously in some areas of their lives (Bou-Habib and Olsaretti2015, Hannan 2018a, Mullin 2007, 2014). However, others argue thateven when children have capacities like those possessed by adults,societies shold protect children rather than deferring to theirautonomy when children’s decisions might lead to very negativeconsequences for them (Betzler 2022, Claassen and Anderson 2012,Franklin-Hall 2013).

Children’s autonomy is supported when adults give them relevantinformation, reasons for their requests, demonstrate interest inchildren’s feelings and perspectives, and offer childrenstructured choices that reflect those thoughts and feelings. Supportfor children’s autonomy in particular domains of action isperfectly consistent with adults behaving paternalistically towardthem at other times and in other domains, when children areill-informed, extremely impulsive, do not appreciate the long-termconsequences of their actions, cannot recognize what is in theirinterest, cannot direct their actions to accord with their interests,or are at risk of significant harm (Mullin 2014).

6. The Goods (and Bads?) of Childhood

“Refrigerator art,” that is, the paintings and drawings ofyoung children that parents display on the family’srefrigerator, is emblematic of adult ambivalence toward theproductions of childhood. Typically, parents are pleased with, andproud of, the art their children produce. But equally typically,parents do not consider the artwork of their children to be goodwithout qualification. Yet, as Jonathan Fineberg has pointed out(Fineberg, 1997, 2006), several of the most celebrated artists of the20th century collected child art and were inspired by it. It may bethat children are more likely as children to produce art, theaesthetic value of which a famous artist or an art historian canappreciate, than they will be able to later as adults.

According to what we have called the “Aristotelianconception”, childhood is an essentially prospective state. Onsuch a view, the value of what a child produces cannot be expected tobe good in itself, but only good for helping the child to develop intoa good adult. Perhaps some child art is a counterexample to thisexpectation. Of course, one could argue that adults who, as children,were encouraged to produce art, as well as make music and excel atgames, are more likely to be flourishing adults than those who are notencouraged to give such “outlets” to their energy andcreativity. But the example of child art should at least make onesuspicious of Michael Slote’s claim that “just as dreamsare discounted except as they affect (the waking portions of) ourlives, what happens in childhood principally affects our view of totallives through the effects that childhood success or failure aresupposed to have on mature individuals” (Slote, 1983, 14).

Recent philosophical work on the goods of childhood (Brennan 2014,Gheaus 2014, Macleod 2010) stresses that childhood should not beevaluated solely insofar as it prepares the child to be a fullyfunctioning adult. Instead, a good childhood is of intrinsic and notmerely instrumental value. Different childhoods that equally preparechildren to be capable adults may be better or worse, depending on howchildren fare qua children. Goods potentially specific to childhood(or, more likely, of greatest importance during childhood) includeopportunities for joyful and unstructured play and socialinteractions, lack of significant responsibility, considerable freetime, and innocence, particularly sexual innocence. Play, forinstance, can be of considerable value not only as a means forchildren to acquire skills and capacities they will need as adults,but also for itself, during childhood.

Even more recently, some philosophers (Hannan 2018b, Hannan and Leland2018) have questioned whether there are features of childhood thatmake childhood bad for children. Candidate bad-making features includechildren’s impaired practical identity, their beingasymmetrically physically and emotionally vulnerable to their parentsand needing extensive control by them, and their lack of a fixedpractical identity. Any evaluation of features that are particularlyvaluable in childhood, and either uniquely or more easily accessed inchildhood, should be balanced against consideration of features thatmake it a worse stage of life than adulthood. Bad-making features ofchildhood may be traced either to aspects of childhood that cannot bechanged or to contingent social arrangements that may leave childrenvulnerable to abuse or neglect at the hands of their intimatecaregivers, without much opportunity for recourse.

7. Philosophical Thinking in Children

For a full discussion of this topic see the entry onPhilosophy for Children.

8. Moral Status of Children

It is uncontroversial to judge that what Mary Anne Warren termsparadigmatic humans have moral status (Warren 1992). Paradigmatichumans are adults with relatively standard cognitive capacities forself-control, self-criticism, self-direction, and rational thought,and are capable of moral thought and action. However, the grounds forthis status are controversial, and different grounds for moral statushave direct implications for the moral status of children. JanNarveson (1988), for instance, argues that children do not have moralstatus in their own right because only free rational beings, capableof entering into reciprocal relations with one another, havefundamental rights. While Narveson uses the language of rights in hisdiscussion of moral status (people have direct moral duties only torights holders on his account), moral status need not be discussed inthe language of rights. Many other philosophers recognize children ashaving moral status because of their potential to become paradigmatichumans without committing to children having rights. For instance,Allen Wood writes: “it would show contempt for rational natureto be indifferent to its potentiality in children.” (Wood 1998,198)

When children are judged to have moral status because of theirpotential to develop the capacities of paradigmatic adults (we mightcall these paradigmatic children), this leaves questions about themoral status of those children who are not expected to live toadulthood, and those children whose significant intellectualdisabilities compromise their ability to acquire the capacities ofparadigmatic adults. There are then three common approaches that grantmoral status to non-paradigmatic children (and other non-paradigmatichumans). The first approach deems moral consideration to track speciesmembership. On this approach all human children have moral statussimply because they are human (Kittay 2005). This approach has beencriticized as being inappropriately speciesist, especially by animalrights activists. The second approach gives moral status to childrenbecause of their capacity to fare well or badly, either onstraightforwardly utilitarian grounds or because they have subjectiveexperiences (Dombrowski 1997). It has been criticized by some forfailing to distinguish between capacities all or almost all humanchildren have that are not also possessed by other creatures who feelpleasure and pain. The third approach gives moral status tonon-paradigmatic children because of the interests others with moralstatus take in them (Sapontzis 1987), or the relationships they havewith them (Kittay 2005). Jaworska and Tannenbaum (2018) offer amore recent version of such an account by arguing that children whoare human and raised in a person-rearing manner have moral status.

Sometimes the approaches may be combined. For instance, Warren writesthat young children and other non-paradigmatic humans have moralstatus for two sorts of reasons: “their rights are based notonly on the value which they themselves place upon their lives andwell-being, but also on the value which other human beings place onthem.” (1992. 197) In addition to these three most commonapproaches, Mullin (2011) develops a fourth: some non-paradigmaticchildren (and adults) have moral status not simply because othersvalue them but because they are themselves capable of being activeparticipants in morally valuable relationships with others. Theserelationships express care for others beyond their serving as meansfor one’s own satisfaction. Approaches to moral status thatemphasize children’s capacity to care for others in morallyvaluable relationships also raise interesting questions aboutchildren’s moral responsibilities within those relationships(see Mullin 2010).

For more on this topic see the entry on thegrounds of moral status.

9. Other Issues

The topics discussed above hardly exhaust the philosophy of childhood.Thus, we have said nothing about, for example, philosophicalliterature on personhood as it bears on questions about the moralityof abortion, or bioethical discussions about when it is appropriatefor parents to consent to children’s participation in medicalresearch or refuse medical treatment of their children. There has beenincreasing attention in recent years to questions about theappropriate limits of parental authority over children, about thesource and extent of parents and the state’s responsibilitiesfor children, and about the moral permissibility of parents devotingsubstantial resources to advancing the life prospects of theirchildren. These and many other topics concerning children may befamiliar to philosophers as they get discussed in other contexts,particularly within family ethics and bioethics. Discussing them underthe rubric, ‘philosophy of childhood,’ as well in theother contexts, may help us see connections between them and otherphilosophical issues concerning children.

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