ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on moral issues of individual rights and freedoms and democratic participation in social structures. It argues that children in diverse cultural settings develop notions of autonomy and apply their developing conceptions of fairness and justice to evaluate the social structures in which they participate, such as the family and school. The chapter discusses some recent studies examining the development of notions of rights and democracy and their associations with parenting processes and children's psychological well-being in urban and rural China. It integrates ideas from both self-determination theory and social domain theory to examine autonomy development as it relates to concepts of rights and freedoms. Children from both individualistic and collectivistic cultural settings possess basic psychological needs for autonomy that are reflected in the concepts of personal choice, rights and democratic principles that they construct out of their social experiences.
