ABSTRACT
The history of children’s rights unfolds in several stages. During the long period in which most people lived in agricultural societies-ranging from early civilizations in the Middle East and China to the eighteenth century or beyond-ideas of children’s rights in any formal sense were not only nonexistent, but clearly preempted by attention to parental authority. This situation began to change, starting in Western Europe and North America, with new ideas about rights in general in the eighteenth century, but also with shifts in children’s actual conditions including the impact of factory labor. Labor laws, new attention to education and other developments through the nineteenth century rarely referred to rights, but clearly began to alter the definition of society’s obligations to children in ways that would later fold into formal discussions of rights. From the early twentieth century onward, considerations of children’s rights became both more international, as in the assertions of new communist regimes, and more explicit. Formal commitments to children’s rights would expand still further, amid some debate, from the later twentieth century onward. Overall, the concept has an impressive pedigree in modern history, but amid a variety of constraints.
