Supporting Families’ Efforts to Advance Children’s Rights and Well-being

Early childhood is widely recognized as a critical stage of development.  Yet it’s also a stage during which children receive relatively little focus in the public domain. Most children’s early years are spent in the home, largely beyond the reach of law which historically has sought to retain a public/private divide.  Yet waiting until children enter the public sphere (by starting school) before attending to children’s rights runs the risk of leaving millions of children at a disadvantage. This is not a call for government interference in the family, but rather a reminder of the state’s obligation to support children’s rights and well-being from birth.  And advancing children’s rights means supporting parents and families, so they can provide for their children and ensure their children’s full development. 

Supporting early childhood development means accounting for the interrelated and interdependent nature of rights. Not only does the realization of particular rights depend on the fulfillment of others—for example, children’s education rights depend, in part, on realization of their health rights—but the rights of certain individuals are tied to the rights of others. The rights of children and the rights of their parents are linked in this way.  Many other governments have acknowledged the indivisible nature of rights and adopted holistic responses to the challenges facing families.  Conditional cash transfer programs, which provide funding to families tied to conditions related to health and education, such as regular health care appointments for children and maintaining children’s enrollment in school, offer one example.

In many countries, conditional cash transfer program alleviate some of the financial pressure on low-income families to have their children work rather than attend school. By doing so, these programs help advance children’s health and education rights, while protecting kids from labor exploitation. At the same time, these payments can help bolster the family’s financial security, alleviating pressure on women in particular to pursue riskier employment, thereby supporting women’s labor rights. Brazil has arguably the most well-known program, Bolsa Família, which has provided assistance to millions of families.  With women constituting over 90% of the beneficiaries, the program has also had a positive impact on children, “increas[ing] school attendance and grade progression.”

Holistic approaches to the rights of children and their families make sense. One bill recently introduced in Congress advances this approach. Earlier this month, Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), Rep, Joseph Crowley (D-NY) and Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL) introduced the Child Care Access to Resources for Early-learning Act (Child C.A.R.E. Act) H.R. 4524/S. 2539.  The legislation would help guarantee affordable, high-quality child care for working families earning up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Guaranteeing access to high-quality child care would simultaneously help advance children’s development while alleviating employment and other economic pressures on working parents.

With sixty-five percent of children under 6 years old living either in families with both parents working or with a single parent working, quality child care is critical both to children and their parents.  This bill deserves support, as do other efforts to develop holistic programs that account for the rights of children and their families.

For more on the bill, click here.

Originally published at Human Rights at Home blog and also published at First Focus.