ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with the challenge to further develop conceptual clarifications about how children’s rights relate to the future. First, it briefly retraces how the author came to consider the relationship between children’s rights and the future as a central problem in children’s rights studies. Next, the conceptual questions this chapter seeks to address are clarified by questioning the notion ‘coevalness’. Taking the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment no. 26 (2023) on children’s rights and the environment as a starting point, it then reflects on the different ways in which children and the future are being considered. Recognizing children as present future-makers is crucial for advancing an emancipatory perspective on children’s rights as it creates conceptual space for children to critically engage with, and participate in, discussions, on equal footing with others, regarding their self-involved futures, future children, and the future of humankind.
