[Can the family continue to guarantee the rights of children?]

The legal position of children is based essentially on the assumption that the family can always safeguard the child's welfare in confrontations with a third party. Therefore children have not been granted autonomous legal status; their interests are protected by the term "the child's best interest", which although incorporated into law is not defined. In recent years more attention has been paid to the legal status of children, and a certain amount of autonomy has been granted, although not without contest. This tendency is an expression of a change in family structure, which until recently conformed to the ideal of the nineteenth century bourgeois family. Our own limited investigations show, in addition to already well known demographic changes, that in the course of our century young children have become more and more limited in their opportunities to form strong emotional bonds. Only since then has the dual bond of early childhood been recognized as being of primary importance. The family is becoming increasingly inadequate. Children are therefore increasingly endangered by the death or divorce of their parents. As a result it is essential that better legal provision be made to ensure that they are regarded as autonomous individuals.