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The Convention on the Rights of the Child was a very important event ... the passage by the
General Assembly was a very important event for people who work with children throughout the
world. It really sort of was an ethical framework of confronting children’s problems and
addressing them in a way that involved children in a more respectful way than had been done
conventionally, where you do it through a parent, you do it through advocates for children, but
children themselves were sort of conceived of as irresponsible, as immature, unreliable, and the
Convention says that ethically this may be true, but one has to adjust one’s framework to the
developmental competence of a child, so all 7 year olds are not the same. Some are more ready to
participate in decision-making than others are and one has to take that ethic, if you will,
into consideration. One of the things that we were really concerned about is how to involve
children in a legitimate equal way in bringing them into the project. We were Harvard
professors, we were scientists, established scientists, we were professionals. So here we are
working with children and we want their honest opinions about things, but we don’t know them and
there is a sort of classic authoritarian stance where children are supposed to succumb, if you
will, or agree with, or obey, or play by the rules that adults set. So that happened. I mean,
this ethical application and extension of the Convention was happening at the time that we were
formulating the project on human development in Chicago neighborhoods, thinking about how would
we address the problems of children in a city like Chicago when we were primarily interested in
violence. So we started to think seriously about this and it was in the Chicago project that we
started this idea of consulting with children - having children become interns in the project.
So during the summers we would have small groups of children come and actually learn the
research techniques that we were using. And from there the idea grew to say that if we’re
interested in community welfare collective advocacy, which was a great discovery of the Chicago
project, then what role do children play in the understanding of that, and what role should
children play in building more competent neighborhoods?