Babies are people

Rights for babies will be a new idea to a lot of people and a silly idea to some. Babies are completely dependent on adults to do and decide everything for them; they can’t ask for what they need or say or take what they want, so how they possibly have rights and what could those rights be? A few people say they are actually offended by the idea of babies having rights because rights should bring responsibilities or obligations with them and babies cannot meet any of those.

All those positions need re-thinking. People who have never given a thought to babies’ rights probably haven’t thought very much about babies. Human rights belong to everyone who is human, and babies are certainly that.

Of course babies can’t exercise all their human rights but that doesn’t mean they don’t have them. A new baby can’t exercise control over his own head but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.

The concept of rights only seems absurdly grown up for children who are too young to express opinions and make decisions if human rights are confused with civil rights. Meeting the idea for the first time people say things like, 'Surely civil rights are for citizens?' 'Surely citizens are individuals who can make their views known?" And "Surely people are only ‘entitled’ to rights if they acknowledge concomitant responsibilities?'

Many such people are uncomfortable with the language of ‘rights’, feeling that somehow one person’s rights are always at the expense of somebody else’s power, privilege or property. And that’s especially true of children’s rights, which many parents, carers and teachers see as infringing their own ‘rights’ and authority, and communities often see as something that should be subject to responsible behaviour – not rights at all but social contracts.

With that mindset it’s not surprising if the idea of babies’ rights is one step too far. It’s a mindset we need to change, though, for the sake of all babies, the families who care for them and the children they will grow into.

Rights for babies will be a new idea to a lot of people and a silly idea to some. Babies are completely dependent on adults to do and decide everything for them; they can’t ask for what they need or say or take what they want, so how they possibly have rights and what could those rights be? A few people say they are actually offended by the idea of babies having rights because rights should bring responsibilities or obligations with them and babies cannot meet any of those.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

Twenty years ago the UK, along with almost every other nation (the notable exception being
the US) signed The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the second most
widely ratified of all conventions ever produced and the most lastingly influential document concerning children.

As the title suggests the Convention is for children and as its interpreting committee makes clear, that means all children, all the time and everywhere. (Articles 1 & 2).

As the Convention was originally drawn up, though, its focus was mainly on older children
and young people; those who could exercise such rights as having their opinions listened to
and contributing to decisions affecting them (Article 12). Where the rights of very young
children are specifically mentioned they mostly refer to rights to physical health and to the care
of children who are not being looked after by their parents (Articles 20-27).

The committee has worked to correct that, but even its General Comment No 7 ‘Implementing child rights in early childhood’ does not focus on infancy. Young children are defined as those under eight years old and while babies are certainly included, (especially in Articles 6, 7 & 8. Features of, and Research into early childhood) they are not specified or differentiated.

Universal recognition of the rights of people who are under one or two years old is both important and urgent. Important because human rights matter just as much (or more if that is possible) to very young, rapidly developing infants as to older children, adolescents or adults. Urgent because this youngest age-group is the most vulnerable to neglect and abuse and currently the most likely to die at the hands of parents, step-parents or ‘carers’.

The particular importance of recognising and respecting infants’ rights

A breach of the human rights of an older child or an adolescent - discrimination, perhaps, or even forceful separation from loving parents- may change his attitudes and his life-course but will probably leave his self – his personality - more or less unscathed. Breaching an infant’s rights, on the other hand, may actually effect the person she becomes, distorting the development of her brain and the working of her nervous system and lessening development of the resilience she will need to cope with difficulties later on.

we’ve known for a long time that a baby’s relationships – and therefore the way he is treated and the environment in which he learns - effect his behaviour, but it is only recently that research has begun to show that those environmental variables effect the actual structure and functioning of his brain and therefore the kind of adult he becomes and, if he has children, the kind of parent. So ensuring the human rights of one generation maximises the chance of human rights for the next, while ignoring those rights: withholding respect, affirmation, inclusion and freedom, tends to pass from one generation to the next too.

This is fresh knowledge coming from contemporary neuroscience; from brain scans in humans and years of research on the brains of primates and other mammals. Sometimes knowledge that is new and surprising is partly camouflaged in old knowledge. Everyone knows, for instance, that the more a baby is talked to the more rapidly his own speech will develop. But not everyone is yet aware that being talked to actually increases aspects of brain growth and maximises a baby’s intelligence. Similarly, it is well-known that babies are easily damaged by physical abuse, but not everyone realises that even if there is no physical damage done to a baby’s brain, fear of violence can distort its development.

Babies’ rights in parents’ hands

Recognising babies’ rights and ensuring that their particular needs are met is the essence of child protection, preventing many problems and interrupting others before they escalate.
The Convention recognises that this is primarily the obligation of parents:

Respect for parents’ roles includes the obligation on States and agencies "not to separate children from their parents unless it is in the child’s best interests" (Article 9). The requirement that all adults and institutions must act "in the best interests of the child" (Article 3) is threaded through many articles. To that end, States must support and assist families in nurturing their children (Article 5) and seek to improve perinatal care for mothers and babies (Article 6).

Article 6 is concerned with the right to life, survival and development, and recognises that poverty and disease remain major obstacles to realising rights in early childhood. But this article recognises that psychosocial well being is interdependent with health and may be put at risk not only by poverty, neglect and abuse but also by insensitive treatment and restricted opportunities.

The Committee’s ‘General Comment no.7’ fills out these messages, talking of the interweaving of children’s health and psycho-social wellbeing, the importance of the ‘strong mutual attachments’ between babies and their parents or caregivers, and the consequent importance for infant rights of providing both practical and emotional support to new mothers and fathers.

This powerful mondial convention, and its committee, makes it clear that while all under-eighteens have the same rights because they are human children, it is only over time that each individual gradually becomes mature enough to understand and realise his or her rights (the concept of ‘evolving capacities’ Article 5).

During this process parents (and others) must continually adjust the levels of support and guidance they offer taking account of children’s interests and wishes as well as their capacities to understand their own best interests and make decisions accordingly. Under-ones have the same rights as all older children because they are human, but they cannot exercise many of those rights for themselves because they are babies. Unfortunately many ordinarily well-intentioned adults, even those who claim to support the Convention on the Rights of the Child, fail to recognise and act upon the obligation that puts upon them.

Some claim that the notion of universal human rights for infants is untenable because there are such wide differences in cultural traditions, and expectations and opinions concerning birth and the care and upbringing of young children. However that explanation is neither acceptable nor adequate because the CRC is sensitive to all such variations, recognising many different practices and opinions but always underpinning the full range with universal human rights.

Article 19 which deals with discipline is a clear example. ‘Discipline’ is a righteous part of parenting and most people maintain that it is parents’ right – even their duty – to discipline their children as they think best. The real meaning of discipline, of course, is teaching children how to behave rather than punishing them for behaving otherwise.

Article 19 does not specify what forms of punishment are or are not acceptable but stresses the underlying principle that children, like everyone else, have the right to protection from any and all forms of violence. Any right parents in any culture or society may claim to punishing children physically, to hitting or otherwise hurting them, to confining, isolating or humiliating them, is therefore in direct conflict with children’s basic rights. Furthermore, while the laws of most countries extend far greater protection from being hit and humiliated to adults than to children, the special defences in the legal systems of some states that protect parents, teachers and carers from prosecution if the violence they do to a child is in the name of discipline, also breach the right to equal protection under the law.

A more realistic reason for the tendency to ignore babies’ rights is that babies themselves tend to be ignored – or cooed over as if they were puppies not people. The Committee on the Rights of the Child requires that "children, including the very youngest children, be respected as persons in their own right…" but often they are not. Instead, babies are seen – if they are seen at all – as appendages or extensions or burdens of their mothers, or as schoolchildren-in-the-making.

Every baby’s development crucially depends on what psychologists call ‘attachment’: human infants’ inbuilt drive to search for a consistently available person with whom she can make a close, secure, mutual relationship and to whom she turns whenever she is anxious or upset. A completing half; a partner in the business of growing up. In all cultures where studies have been done it seems that the mother is a baby’s emotional starting point if she is available at all.

Given our recent and accumulating knowledge of the extent to which babies in the womb are influenced by mothers’ activities and feelings, moods and states this is not surprising. But although mothers usually come first in a baby’s attachment hierarchy, they are not the only people to whom babies become attached. In the second year, given the opportunity, babies also make attachments to fathers that are different but no less powerful.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of attachment relationships to an individual baby’s growth and development. It is through being loved that children become both loving, and lovable. It is through the constant experience of being respected that children come to respect other people. It is because their overwhelming feelings, their impulses and their wild behaviours are safely contained and controlled that they gradually achieve self-control. And it is two or three years of such a relationship that brings them to a point where they begin to understand the whys and wherefores of social demands; to empathise with other people’s feelings, and, even later still, to develop what we call ‘theory of mind’ which is the ability to understand that other people may feel differently from themselves and therefore to see different viewpoints.

One of the most important and most visible impacts of the psychological context of a child’s upbringing is her self-esteem. Any individual’s self-esteem is built out of, and held up by, the esteem in which other people appear to hold her. If parents make demands on children which those children cannot understand – or understand but cannot meet – the children constantly fail and the parents are constantly irritated. And ‘constantly’ is the right word. Research suggests that many parents of mobile babies or young toddlers issue prohibitions ("Stop that"; "don’t touch") every nine minutes on average, and according to the last big survey undertaken for the Department of Health about three quarters of them, 75%, smack babies under two.

Children who are treated as stupid, or naughty, or at least disappointing soon realise that the parents see them like that. And since babies and young children accept parents’ views uncritically, it is not long before they decide that the parents are right: they aren’t good enough; they are stupid. Low self-esteem often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. To keep ‘taking a child down’ – whether in some general way that makes her feel that she was an unwanted baby, or that she was a disappointment because her parents wanted a boy – or in some more specific way such as calling her fat or stupid – is a fundamental violation of the child’s right to protection from mental or physical neglect or negligent treatment, under Article 19.

Babies in action

Babies cannot exercise their human rights or even survive without constant nurturance and protection, but they are not passive recipients of the treatment adults hand out to them. Provided there are one or more adults around who are willing, able and interested enough to watch and interact with them and form a mutual attachment, babies actively assert their personhood, their individuality and their needs, from the moment of birth.

When a mother watches her newly born baby she sees a small and crumpled face relax and smooth itself after the stress of being born. She sees enormous navy blue eyes struggle to open. She sees and feels small hands scrabbling to get close and to reach her breast. She sees a person. When a father watches his hours-old child, awake and calm, he sees her look at him; and if he puts out his tongue and watches and waits patiently, she will put out her tongue in imitation. Definitely a person. Before long, the baby cries. The sound is penetrating. It is the sound that most easily wakes women and passes biochemical messages to the womb and breasts of new mothers. Clearly a person with needs and wants. Like a ringing phone, a baby’s crying demands a response, but unlike a phone, ‘answering’ may not be as simple as pressing a button. What does the baby want or need? The answer will not be in a leaflet, on the internet or in a book, nor will it be on a timetable or routine that says it is (or is not) ‘time for a feed’. It is not the clock but the baby parents must read. Something is making her uncomfortable or afraid. Is she hungry (no matter how long it is since she last nursed)? Is she lonely for warm bodily contact? Is she cold or hot, has she got pins and needles in her arm, is the room too bright, the toddler too rough or loud, or is it some nebulous discomfort from within her? The baby doesn’t know why she is crying and her parents may never find out, but their efforts to comfort her keep a lid on her stress levels and, over months, teach her that when she is distressed she can count on them for comfort.

All babies have a right to be attended to, nurtured, by adults, usually parents or parent figures, who act always in their best interests. Article 6 on the right to life, to survival and full development, stresses that while poverty and disease remain major obstacles to realising rights in early childhood, physical health and psychosocial wellbeing are interdependent and psychosocial health may be put at risk not only by poverty, neglect or abuse but also by insensitive treatment and restricted opportunities. Babies don’t only need adults to calm and soothe them when they are unhappy or afraid but also to play with them and stimulate them into states of joy, interest and excitement. Positive emotions are important for brain development and from very early in a baby’s life, and within a secure attachment relationship, she is developing the ability to communicate and to regulate negative and positive emotional states.

In the first weeks of life the positives often take second place because new babies don’t fit easily into today’s post-industrial adult lives, especially their night-lives. In the weeks during which a baby gradually establishes diurnal rhythms and longer sleep spans, many parents truly suffer from the exhaustion of broken nights. Most people take it for granted that it’s up to parents to decide how to manage: whether to take the baby into their bed to sleep with them; to keep picking the baby up and feeding and comforting her, or leave her in her cot to cry herself back to sleep.

But do all parents have sufficient knowledge of their baby’s development to ensure that what they decide is the best for her? And do they have the right to do as they please without ‘reference’ to the baby? It’s easy to see (and hear) that a baby who is left alone and crying hard feels extreme stress but many new babies cry hard quite often so it’s not so easy to know how much this crying matters. Acute and continuing stress starts a hormonal chain reaction that ultimately stimulates the baby’s adrenal glands into releasing cortisol, (known as the stress hormone) which floods her body and brain. Very high levels of cortisol that build up over time (we don’t yet know exactly how high or for how long) can be literally toxic to a young baby’s rapidly developing brain and her stress response system (known as the HPA axis) will go on pumping out cortisol until someone turns it off by responding to the baby, picking her up, making her feel better.

There’s a great deal we don’t yet know about stress, cortisol and infant brains. It’s clearly not the case that all crying is damaging. Indeed it would be impossible to care sensitively for a baby who never cried at all because there would be no way of knowing when she needed something.

However, research makes it clear that repeated episodes of extreme upset, when the baby sounds out of control, hysterical, and is not comforted, can permanently affect her response system, setting it (so to speak) to ‘hyper-sensitive’ so that, anticipating lonely despair, she overreacts to minor stress with major fear and anxiety, not only as a baby but as a child and an adult too. And there’s even more alarming evidence accumulating that sometimes a baby who gives up protesting when she’s left and goes quiet, may not have ‘learned’ to settle herself without adult help, but, having discovered that adult help will not be forthcoming, may have given up in despair.

Parents have legal rights over their children as well as responsibilities for them, as Article 3 (and other articles) make clear, but those rights do not include a right to treat those children as they please. In fact the caring relationship between a parent and his or her baby is not one of right at all, but of obligation. Parents have an obligation to provide the minute by minute care their baby needs but no right to override the baby’s own, separate rights in doing so. The CRC makes it very clear that from the moment of birth children’s individual rights must be recognised and protected, even though those rights may clash with their parents’ wishes.
How easily and how well parents exercise their child’s rights on her behalf partly depends on the extent to which they are and have been able to exercise their own human rights. A mother who is a refugee from abuse in her own country, imprisoned in her home by domestic violence, or trapped in poverty and deprivation can do little to liberate her children to fuller lives. Likewise a mother who never developed close attachment to her own parents or whose growing attachment was broken when she was moved into care and then, perhaps, from one foster home to another, may be quite unable to provide secure attachment for her child. And the mother with mental health problems, who perhaps went through pregnancy resentful or afraid, found the birth process traumatic and lost herself in postnatal depression, may not see her baby as loving and beloved but as hating and hateful.

Emotional and mental health barriers between mothers and children may be even more important than practical barriers, but they often go together and between the two, failing timely intervention and effective help, deprivation of human rights in one generation impinges powerfully on the next. And the damage may not stop with one baby. The removal into care or the placing for adoption of a child whose mother has shown herself to be neglectful, abusive or addicted, often leaves the mother with intense and long-lasting grief and anger which she may seek to assuage by getting pregnant again. If this new baby is taken from her immediately after birth the pattern is likely to be repeated, with exorbitant lifelong costs to that mother, each of those children and the exchequer.

While the CRC makes it clear that from the moment of birth parents must recognise and protect children’s individual rights, even if and when they clash with their own wishes, it does not leave that responsibility to parents alone. There are frequent references to States’ responsibility to take measures to support and assist parents both with practicalities such as a reasonable standard of living and provision for health care, and with measures to foster their caring relationships. The Convention does not detail the plans and policies that States should adopt to meet these obligations, any more than it details the child-rearing practices parents should adopt to meet theirs. Policies, plans and practices are culture-bound. Only the underlying human rights are universal.