ABSTRACT
This chapter will review the gendering of young children and their families with respect to the current human rights agenda. It examines landmark legislation and ongoing legal reforms that have brought human rights into the public arena and into the personal lives of children and families. The human rights agenda implies that responsible and caring adults will ensure their children’s survival, protection and participation in the world. The settings where such rights are enacted, however, are largely gendered settings: settings where participants in families and in early childhood services are positioned according to gender and its socially constructed meanings. These gendered settings, moreover, rumour pervasive, overarching, social oppression that arbitrarily gives voice to some people, yet marginalises and silences others. Two seemingly divergent examples of this phenomenon that are used later as part of the cultural backcloth to this chapter are the gendered treatment of women and their children in the criminal justice system and the positioning of children as gendered consumers in a materialist culture. These two examples are, moreover, symptomatic of the gendered societies in which early childhood professionals live and work. This chapter further challenges us to reflect on the human rights discourse as it applies to this field of influence and, to this end, examines Young’s (1990) notion of social justice and Cox’s (1995) notion of social capital in living and working with children and their families as ethical human beings.
