ABSTRACT
Children, especially young children, are frequently taken to be paradigmatic examples of vulnerable human beings.1 Their special vulnerability in turn provides a justification for affording them protections that are not usually extended to adults and to closely monitoring and regulating choices they make. Children are generally not expected to secure their own basic needs. Thus adults assume primary responsibility for ensuring that children are adequately fed, clothed and sheltered. Children are also subject to adult paternalistic authority. Adults force children to act in ways that are conducive to promoting children’s current and future welfare and moral development. Children must attend school, they are restricted from engaging in various kinds of risky activities and adults make a wide range of decisions about what they may do in their daily lives such as when they go to bed and with whom they play. For various reasons, the adults who typically have the greatest authority to make decisions about children are usually their parents. Parental authority is, of course, exercised within constraints.2 For instance, parents may have the authority to decide which school to send their children, but they do not have the authority to deny education to their children. For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus mainly on the relation between the exercise of parental authority and the vulnerability of children. Most parents try to exercise their authority over children in ways that recognize their children’s vulnerability and display concern for their children’s well-being. Yet the closeness of the relationship between parents and children-both physically and emotionally-combined with the power differentials between parents and children render children especially vulnerable to harm by their parents. Parental harm to children can be deliberate or unintentional, but in either case, its effects can be profound and long lasting. Physical abuse or neglect of children by parents can impede normal cognitive and emotional development. Psychological mistreatment-e.g., withholding love and affection-can have equally bad effects, both on children’s well-being as children and their well-being as adults. All of this, I assume, is familiar and gives us reason to be concerned with the way families are structured and how parental authority is appropriately exercised.
