Children's and adolescents' understanding of rights: balancing nurturance and self-determination

This study examined the development of young people's understanding of nurturance and self-determination rights. One hundred and sixty-nine participants from 5 age groups (8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 years of age) participated in a semistructured interview containing hypothetical vignettes, in which a story character wished to exercise a self-determination right or nurturance right that conflicted with the wishes or practices of those in authority. Participants were asked to decide if they would support the story character's request for rights and to justify their decisions. Younger children (8- to 12-year-olds) were significantly less likely to identify both nurturance and self-determination rights as salient than were older participants (14- to 16-year-olds). The types of reasoning participants exhibited for the two types of rights differed at all ages. Reasoning about nurturance rights did not show an age-related progression from concrete to abstract, whereas reasoning about self-determination rights was more likely to exhibit such a progression. Results suggest that previous attempts to explain the development of understanding of rights in terms of global stages does not fully capture children's and adolescents' reasoning, and, in particular, such a framework may not account for the differences in young people's thinking about the 2 types of rights.