ABSTRACT
The “best interests of the child” standard is popular not merely because of its gender neutrality, but because it purportedly puts the children’s interests above those of adults. Adults ultimately settled on this standard as the end game of a major struggle among themselves. By itself, this strongly suggests that the standard was not designed with children in mind. That hardly gets to the bottom of it. There is less connection between the best interests standard and a childcenteredness policy than even this history suggests.
