Children first

Imagine we could agree that the best public policy was one that conferred the greatest overall capability gains upon society-at-large, now and into the future.  Capability is about agency—that is, about maximizing the range and variety of choices available to individuals, especially those who’ve had the fewest choices in the past because of poverty, compromised health or limited education.  Capability gains assume that the capacity of individuals to exercise more meaningful choices for themselves also benefits civil society at large.  A policy that endowed a greater number of individuals with a greater range of choices would better serve the interests of society-at-large than a policy that permitted agency only to a few.  To maximize the capability gains of society-at-large (which is what any public policy ought to be doing), we would have to ask ourselves where the greatest potential for such public gains was to be found.

It would almost certainly be with those members of society whose talents, abilities and capacities were as yet undiscovered, untapped or underutilized, but who also had the greatest quantity of time in which to discover those as-yet-unrealized capacities and put them to use.  These are not the elderly, whose talents have already been discovered (or squandered), and who have likely declined in ability to improve them further.  And elders of course have the least abundance of time in which to contribute to the common good (or even their own).  Yet they have, in the last few generations, consumed disproportionate quantities of public resources, including health care, property and status.  But those with the greatest potential to improve their individual lives as well as to maximize the public good—and the greatest quantity of time in which to manifest this potential—are right in front of us.  Children.  The more that we policy-making citizens enable children—and not just some of them but all of them—to discover and realize their talents and capacities, the more our society as a whole will benefit, and continue to do so for generations to come.  After all, public policies are not for the present, which cannot be changed.  They are the framework of our future.

To maximize the well-being of society-at-large (rather than just perpetuating the interests of already-privileged elites) we would do best to prioritize the well-being and opportunities of those who have the greatest capacity to realize future gains, despite being without present voice and influence.  We should therefore establish as a first principle that what is best for children as an interest group is best for society as a whole.  A civil society could do no better than to put children at the forefront of all policy considerations.  Not just your children.  Everyone’s children.  And to maximize the capability gains for society-at-large, we would prioritize those children who were presently least advantaged.  The ability of poor and disadvantaged children to realize their fullest potential—now constrained by lack of access to resources and want of representation—would confer the greatest absolute gain upon civil society as a whole.

So the one interest group that most fully deserves to be singled out for attention—and deliberately pushed to the head of all public policy considerations—is the one made up of children.  Children are a clearly-defined group with easily-identified needs and interests.  But unlike most political interest groups that conspire to steer public policies in their favor, they have no voice of their own, no right to participate in government, and cannot reasonably be expected to make a case for themselves.  They will not be able to exploit any advantages they are given to gain more.  And no individual member of society can expect to remain a member of this group for long.  Their advantages are strictly time-limited.  Every individual member of society will necessarily belong to this interest group for a portion of their lives, so no one will be excluded from advantage.  This group is both most vulnerable to present harm and yet most likely to reap the long-term benefits of well-crafted, society-favoring policies.  In other words, what is done for this interest group will have the greatest and most enduring effect on society at large.

Thus the best general rule for making a better civil society and for crafting more efficient and capability-enhancing policies is to put the collective interests of children first—to prioritize the needs and well-being of those citizens who have not yet entered into their full rights of citizenship.  But let’s be clear.  This does not mean merely that voters and policy-makers should be encouraged to consider their own children—which is not hard to do—but to give equal priority to all the children living within their society.  To this end, they must remind themselves to think of children as an interest group (not merely their own children as an extension of their family interests) and as the most important of all interest groups.

This may all seem a little strange—somehow both obvious and unsettling.  Adults already tend to believe that they put children first, though of course they mean their own.  But they do not necessarily think of children-at-large as an interest group.  To make children first our public priority may seem faintly ridiculous—being both reasonable and obvious—but it is not at all what our present civil policies are designed or intended to do.  Voters generally want to know what advantages specific policies will confer upon them, not upon society-at-large—and politicians seeking elected office dare not contradict them.  So we need to spell it out, make it embarrassingly clear.

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Children are at once the best-protected and most vulnerable members of society.  They are guarded by watchful and highly-motivated parents, but only a few at a time.  Children in general are not so well looked after.  They are at the mercy of overwhelming forces.  Their present circumstances and individual futures are largely determined by accidents of birth.  The children of elites can be sure of having every opportunity that family resources can conceivably supply and thus an overwhelming likelihood of doing as well in life as their parents did.  The children of poor parents may be just as well-loved, and yet without timely opportunities in their youth they will be far less likely of coming near to their individual potentials.  They will not only fail to realize their own best lives, but will be prevented from benefitting society as substantially as they might have done.  They may even become a burden upon society when there was no need of it.  And those wealthy, elite children?  They may get a little too much help at every stage.  Their lives may well prove to be too easy and undemanding, which means that they too will not reach their full potential.

The principle of putting children first in public policy is the fairest and most efficient means of dealing with problems of social and political inequality, which no fair-minded and self-interested democracy can afford to ignore.  A highly unequal society can neither prosper nor survive as an active democracy, considering that the equality of citizens is perhaps its most fundamental premise.  (Mild or temporary inequalities may not matter as much.)   If we are to believe that equality is a good, that the preservation of democracy is worthwhile, and that we therefore ought to take steps to reduce or mitigate the harmful effects of inequality (even if not eliminating them entirely), then our most efficient route is to begin with children.  No one can reasonably argue that children deserve their poverty (whatever you might say about their parents), or that they have chosen their place in society, whether at the top or the bottom, through hard work or laziness.  They are not responsible for their good or bad fortunes.  A civil society that takes its words seriously cannot afford to overlook such undeserved inequalities—they must be addressed openly, deliberately, robustly.  Even elite apologists, who abhor equalities of outcome, often talk approvingly of equalities of opportunity—sometimes called a level playing field.  But there can be no level playing field, no meaningful equality of opportunity, without meaningful political interventions.  Children are not free agents.  They cannot choose to change their circumstances or understand the choices available to adults.  But they experience the full consequences of inequality.  The conditions they experience as children will affect and constrain all of their future choices, even their capacity to make reasonable choices as adults.

The principle of children first will help to remedy, though not entirely remove, the problem of the absence of children’s voices within a democratic polity.  We may assume that children by definition are insufficiently mature to understand their own interests, to recognize themselves as members of interest groups, or to adequately voice their own concerns.  They need committed defenders and advocates who are able to do all these things.  But anyone with direct experience has already departed the interest group.  Their parents, surely, will do the job!  No, parents will not be enough.  Parents will certainly be among the advocates, but they are not necessarily used to thinking beyond the specific interests of their own children.  They don’t automatically see children in general as a vulnerable group with specific needs.  (We’ll put aside the question of whether parents always think in a disinterested manner about their own children’s best interests.)  As a civil society, we might choose to assign advocates to children (perhaps an ombudsperson specifically concerned for citizen minors—a tribune of the children) but we will need regularly to remind ourselves that we as active citizens must make ourselves the advocates of the interests of children.  No other interest group is both so important to the well-being of society at large and yet so powerless to speak for themselves.

A general and principled attention to children will not be easily implemented.  The very idea runs against thousands of years of deeply-embedded social prejudices.  Most established civilizations have assumed that social obligations run from offspring to parents, that junior members of society are obliged to obey, support and cater to the needs, demands and egos of older generations.  Many cultures still raise children with the expectations that they will care for their own specific parents when they are old and failing.  (What could be more natural than that?  Actually, there’s very little about this that is natural or obvious.)  We will have to deliberately train ourselves to reverse this long-standing social priority.  A more reasonable civil society would hold that parents owe much more to their children than children do to parents.  Parents knowingly take up their familial obligations.  Children do not.  Only coercion and intensive brain-washing can make children believe that they are fundamentally obligated to their parents.

So here is the first and incomparably just principle of a fair and well-structured civil society.  We must always ask: How would this prospective policy improve the well-being of, or prevent harm to, the pre-adult members of our community?  How would this policy maximize the future capabilities and choices of our society’s youngest members, especially its most disadvantaged ones?  We will keep in mind that good intentions are not enough.  Policy effects must be tested and verified with experience and careful measurement.  Progressive-minded politicians and voters can hardly argue.  Not only is this the fairest of approaches, but the one most likely to generate real social improvements and more durable equalities in the future.  Conservative politicians and voters can hardly spout family values while rejecting a policy that gives transparent priority to children—unless to admit that the well-being of children was never the point of family values.  But most will agree that what is good for children is best for families.  So Children First is a policy that ought to transcend political rivalries.  If children cannot successfully position themselves ahead of other interest groups, it is hard to imagine who else could.  Even puppies and kittens are just temporary juveniles.

If a civilized society is not able to protect and prioritize its most vulnerable members—surely its children—then it cannot reasonably claim the title of civilized. 

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Children are not a permanent interest group, and will necessarily lose their sheltered status as they are forced into adulthood.  But we owe them a reasonably secure future too.  We should be framing our environmental policies (that is, our present use and distribution of resources) with their best futures and unrealized lifespans in mind.  What are their future needs?

Environmental legislation will best be framed when considering the future well-being of children in general (and without concern for arbitrary national borders), rather than merely allowing parents to advantage their own specific children at the expense of children in general.  This may seem easy to grasp in principle but will prove hard to sell to short-sighted and narrowly-interested voters.  A preference for one’s own offspring is easily forgivable but is not enough to answer the pressing problems of our modern civil society.  Environmental degradation and climate change cannot be adequately managed by such narrowly self-interested considerations.  These challenges will affect the future well-being of your own children more than you realize.  But they can only be solved by considering the future well-being of all the world’s children.  We will, as civilized beings, soon be compelled to think more broadly and carefully than we are used to doing.  We will be forced to consider what we can do and what we should do about elites—the chief controllers of resources and the chief contributors to the problem.  What elites are these?  Other and more powerful elites than the majority of us to be sure.  But we must also think about ourselves as among the most privileged of human beings.