ABSTRACT
As the titles of this chapter and book suggest, the basic argument at stake here is that children’s participation and citizenship need adult facilitation. This is, at first glance, an uncontroversial claim. Indeed, it is often regarded as self-evident that children’s citizenship has to be of a certain kind and will be assured through child-friendly forms of participation, special rights to protection and recognition of the family as a unit. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child exemplifies these assumptions, which are premised on perspectives from developmental psychology that emphasise children’s inadequate, but developing, cognitive competences, their dependency and their emotional attachment to their parents and ‘significant others’. In this approach, facilitation is regarded as mediation of children’s voices and taking care of their rights.
