 This program is brought to you by Emory University. As Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, the sponsor of today's forum. In a series of forums this semester, culminating in a big conference next month on the rights of the child, we are exploring some of the legal and cultural and religious dimensions and sources of the rights and duties and needs and concerns of children. Last week in this auditorium, Jeremy Gunn led us in the study of some of the religious rights of children in schools in France and America, focusing especially on the rights of children to express their beliefs in dress, in diet, in ritual, and in turn to be free from participating in ceremonies and activities that combine in untoward and sometimes dangerous ways religion and nationalism. This week, we're going to explore another way of thinking about a children's needs and concerns using the traditional Western language and lens of the vocation of the child. This is an alternative language to the prevalent language today of the best interest of the child. The focus is now really on the best love of the child, and the hypothesis is that the first right of the child is the right to be loved and to be loving. We welcome as leaders of our discussion today three distinguished scholars, one a jurist, one a theologian, one a psychologist, who will unpack with us the promise and potential that pitfalls the problems with this traditional language of a child's vocation. Our first speaker is one of the great deans of the field of religion, children, and education, Professor John E. Coons. Professor Coons is the Bridges Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, Bolt Hall, where he has taught since 1968. He has written a series of pathbreaking books with his colleague Stephen Sugarman on children, choice, and education, with such titles as private wealth and public education, education by choice, scholarships for children, making school choice work. He has also written deeply and powerfully on issues of public law and legal philosophy, culminating in a brilliant title co-authored with Patrick Brennan, By Nature Equal, the Anatomy of a Western Insight, published a few years ago by Princeton University Press. Our second speaker is Professor Marsha Bungie, who has done more than anyone in the past decade to drive ethicists and theologians and historians to take children seriously in their scholarly studies. Professor Bungie is Professor of Theology and the Humanities at Valparaiso University and serves as director of the university's major new project on the child in religion and ethics. She has also been leading the American Academy of Religions consultation on childhood studies and religion. Her book on the child in Christian thought is already becoming a classic in a number of fields and it's bolstered by dozens of her own and other essays and articles in this vein. Our third speaker is Professor Paul Vitz, who is Professor of Psychology at New York University. He is one of the nation's ranking authorities on the intersection of psychology and religion and has written a series of definitive books and articles on issues of fatherhood, forgiveness, and formation. His most recent titles are Faith of the Fatherless and a new title, The Self, Beyond the Post-Modern Crisis. It's a privilege to welcome these three distinguished scholars to our lectern today. Each will speak for 20 minutes and we shall take questions after all three have spoken. They will appear in the order of their introduction. Will you please join me in welcoming Professors Coons, Bungie, and Vitz to Emory University. Is that about right? Is that okay, John? Okay. I hadn't realized that this was a Catholic university. Why did I say that? Can you tell why I had to say that? Look it, they're all in the back of the room. Everybody's, it looks like a Catholic church to me. That's all right. We have no prejudice here. And I'm very happy to be here. I'm very proud to be here. I've tasted, I take that these are Georgia peanuts that you have provided. And I want you to know that we're all very grateful and well-nourished and admiring of the local produce and not least of all, John Whitty, whom you are so lucky to have. I am a jurist. I don't know anything about the subject of theology which I'm about to address. But I find that there's nothing written about it anyway unless you look at Marsha's book. And Marsha herself tells us that the issues are not altogether settled so that it's possible for me to speculate a bit. And I will use some terms that are not traditional. I want you to understand. They're rather odd. And they're an effort to provide a kind of alternative vocabulary to express some of the puzzles that have beset this area. That is really the responsibilities of the child or the vocation of the child. I see it's now vocations. And you should think about that as I'm talking to because although I had preferred vocation, I think on reflection that I really am talking about two different vocations. And you'll, I hope, understand this. I hope I will be understandable on the subject and I'm gonna read this now. We've been asked to reflect upon something called the vocation of childhood. This title raises a nest of specific questions. At their center is the puzzle whether younger children, say those under seven, live an authentic moral life. And if so, in what does it consist? Do infants receive a calling to honor an order of truth and correct conduct that forms and binds their consciences quite apart from the decrees of those adults who hold power over them? When and how could such a true vocation begin? What would be its practical content? And if the child accepts this calling but then makes honest errors of moral judgment, do these mistakes prevent his own self perfection? It could be that young children simply have no calling. Aristotle, Aquinas, and various Christian schools of thought have tended to the view that moral responsibility begins only with the child's capacity to reason about what is true and correct in specific cases. These theories vary from one another and certainly deserve more individual's description than I can give. But their theme is sufficiently common that I will lump them under the term traditional. Taking tradition broadly but seriously, it tells us that prior to the age of reason, children do not influence their own moral state. They neither advance nor impair it. They're essentially amoral and often are described as innocent. Their habits, bad and good, may soon become relevant but not yet. For that, they must begin to think. This moral impotence does not cancel the hope of the religious believer for the young child's salvation. A half dozen theories allow that. But that happy outcome must be affected by some purely external agency such as baptism or unmediated divine election. The idea of a vocation by contrast recognizes a child's own freedom and moral potency. Whatever a calling may be, it can be addressed only to someone with the capacity to hear and answer. Limbo and other non-vocational dispositions of the dead child are therefore outside my focus. I will move instead now to give a bit more shape to tradition which starts the clock of moral responsibility ticking at the age of reason. From that point in time, whatever it is, the child is understood to become both conscious of this personal invitation and able to undertake the commitment that it entails. If he accepts this mission, the circumstances of his own life immediately become the stuff of his moral activity. He will shoulder the responsibility to look for what is fair and just. He will aim to make the best possible judgments about truth and conduct and he will then act upon those judgments with the means at his command. This effort, however, is not enough. For tradition now confronts him with a second and more formidable proposition. Not only did the child's calling await the dawn of reason, but his enthusiastic acceptance followed by his diligence and practice turned out to be insufficient to ensure his own goodness. Searches you well for what is true and right. His hope for goodness depends upon his getting correct answers. The most honest mistake will not only be a nuisance to his neighbor, but will corrupt his own character and bar his self-perfection. As John Finnis puts it, these moral errors are essentially self-determining. That is internal to and constitutive of an individual's character. The onset of reason is then both our hope for self-perfection and our introduction to danger. Until reason dawn, there was no moral risk. Now comes full responsibility to get it right. To be sure under various versions of tradition, there may be excuse for some mistakes, but to be excused does not mean to advance in goodness. At best, the moral bungler stays where he was. Could this be the manner in which our final destiny is shaped? As tradition commonly admits, we are fallible. The reasoning child, like the reasoning adult, will make errors that he cannot avoid. Does God or nature, nevertheless, demand the impossible as the condition of his goodness? Consider the case of the eight-year-old boy, a dedicated searcher who has been assured by every adult around him that girls are inferior. Is he then evil for believing this and devaluing women? If all this false training eventually expires with his own moral commitment to produce a thoroughly devout Muslim, has he forfeited goodness by misjudging the evil of polygamy? Tradition leaves us this puzzle and it burdens every rational actor, child, or adult. Meanwhile, back on the pre-rational side of the age line, tradition, by its own premises, must remain silent about the case of the three-year-old, whose loving and wise parents constantly teach and demand what is true and correct. Does such a child bear no moral duty whatsoever to listen to father and mother and then freely either to obey or to ignore? Is this mind that is too young to decide specific moral issues unable even to be responsible to authority? That proposition scorns the wisdom and experience of every parent by either ever been or known. Between the ages of zero and seven, as Augustine well knew, there is at least something morally important going on that tradition cannot capture. But let me now pose what is the more or less friendly alternative to tradition, a version of moral life that might make more sense of childhood. For convenience, I would refer to this alternative for the moment simply as dissent, emphasizing that it is a respectful dissent. Later, I will give it the name, abtention, abtention, and I will explain that fancy term. Though younger than tradition, the intellectual history of dissent is itself centuries old and quite respectable, stretching from figures such as St. Alphonsus Liguri to many of my own contemporaries, including the late Bernard Lonergan. In my judgment, the core idea of dissent underlies the good news of universal human access to goodness and to God that is announced in the documents of Vatican II. Dissent begins by reassessing the consequences of honest moral error. Like tradition, it recognizes the authenticity and the authority of the received and natural order's truth and correct conduct. All rational actors are bound to seek their terms and they're important. Even our unavoidable mistakes count. To be specific, they disturb the human order by preventing realization of those goods that are contingent and vulnerable. I mean, such things as peace, justice, and the fair distribution of basic resources and opportunities. These ephemeral goods constitute all human possibilities, but one. The one exception being the goodness of the human self. So here is the nub of the difference. Contrary to tradition, dissent holds goodness itself to be available to everyone precisely through the self's affirmation of its vocation to seek the right way as best it can. Whether or not one gets it perfectly straight, all of us are fully equipped to try and that is enough. I pause now to give my favorite technical name to this fundamental choice of the person, either to try or not to try to seek the real good or instead to please oneself. With at least some supporting authority, Patrick Brennan and I have called it, Obtention. According to the OED, the person who obtains is one who invokes some reason as the justification for a choice and does so as a fulfillment of a previous commitment, one that is prior to reason itself. That prior dedication consists in the pledge to bring rationality to bear upon the conduct of one's life. Obtention, then, is the free response to a call to look for, then use the intellectual tools and tools that are available to identify the intelligible content of the true and good. One who answers yes to the call then does what he can with what he's been given and that is enough. This is precisely the active cooperation called for by the vocation. Dissent or now Obtention thus introduces new questions about childhood. One concerns the capacity of the younger child to obtain. While she is yet unable to use what Aristotle calls reason, does this infant nonetheless recognize this calling, this vocation to submit to the authority of an order of right choices? The implications of this possibility could be profound. The child who has been called is quite literally obliged to take up a particular attitude toward this vocation. This summons to begin looking and judging as this becomes possible to her. The calling itself does not specify anything beyond the imperative to respond to this invitation to seek the true and the good, to seek it. Still, this is a vocation to which the child can say yes or no. The child's experience of this unspecific calling may be usefully compared to that of the amnesiac adult described by Gilbert Mylander. This man called Jimmy has lost virtually all memory and is unable to retain new thoughts and perceptions for more than a few moments. Hence, he is unable to make specific moral judgments. He is, however, still quite aware that seeking truth and right judgments is what he's supposed to be doing. Jimmy's case then, sad as it is, remains rich in human possibility. It is an occasion of genuine hope. Here is a mind that still recognizes the imperative to seek and it retains a naked capacity to do that one act to keep trying. Jimmy and the infant can both attend. Each then has free access to goodness. The child, of course, has the additional expectation that memories from her future experiences will gradually enlarge the material on which reason can do its work. In this child's emergent mind, then, we can distinguish the two distinct modalities in which all moral choices are made. The first, what I call, of tension is the simpler response, yes or no, to the invitation to seek the right way. The second is the constant mobilization of our resources, including reason in order to realize through our own actions, whichever of the two basic alternatives we have chosen. We either seek the real good or instead we pursue some simulation of our own invention. What does the child, first experience, when does the child experience the call to attend? So far as I can tell, social psychology has never addressed such a question. Perhaps Paul Vetz will. Recent popular reports of research on early infant intelligence to describe cases of obvious and virtuous empathy of the child's concern for others. Could science ever distinguish such choices of specific right conduct from the prior act of attention? Could it somehow identify these two separate moral events? Jimmy's case suggests this possibility in the case of adults. Indeed, in such a state, all he can do is attend. As to spotting the onset of this capacity in the child, I am not hopeful. Though both the vocation itself and the child's response to it are a distinctive human experience, they are probably beyond empirical accounting. Of course, this would not forbid my non-empirical conviction that infants do in fact recognize the calling and do then give their response at a point in time when they are still unable to judge specific cases. They can, I believe, look even before they can judge, simply because they have willed to cooperate in the task of achieving the right way and the best world of which we centers are theoretically capable. The theological implications of an infant capacity to accept or refuse the vocation may seem a bit scary. What does it imply about the fates of children who die between the experience of vocation and the onset of reason? What does it mean to say that they are responsible for the choice either to attend or instead to refuse to serve? Will a child who swings between yes and no be judged by his commitment at the moment of his death? Does the doctrine of hell here need refinement? For my part, I can only urge against an easy surrender to sentimentality. The infant who is called is not obviously worse off than Jimmy. For nearly all of us, whatever our state, there is something very important to decide. Moreover, the possibility of infant vocation suggests that both tradition and its dissenters could extend the practical moral relevance of reason backward to a much earlier age. I think this is important. Even Aristotle might be interested. Consider the state of the attending child who wills the true and the good, but who has yet little or no capacity for judgment about specific cases? What he might have, nonetheless, is an effective knowledge of his own deficiency. He knows that he does not know. What then is the next question? Try this. How much more reason than this bare awareness of his own ignorance is required for the child to reach a judgment about which adult would be the best substitute for his own reason in specific cases? Could he identify some human authority that he ought to obey in his quest for the true and the good? Now, this question of the best substitute decider is one that is itself addressed to reason. It is a little different from any other moral judgment about conduct in a given situation. And the occasion for that judgment by the child might arrive very early. Every child experiences one or more older individuals who constantly tell him or her what to do because they say it is the right thing to be done in these circumstances. That is, they act as authorities who are agents of the true and the good. Now, at some point, the child attains a marginal but ever-increasing capacity to assess the credibility, the trustworthiness of these various adults who purport to rule him. And my point, of course, is that the infant judgment on that question is an act of practical reason. It may indeed be the initial act of human rationality. The child judges the degree of trust the adult deserves and then responds with obedience or something else. At the beginning, judgments about the most reliable authority will be poorly informed. The child probably will experience few adults who are not his parents. There's little evidence to go on. Still, he will do what he can with that information he has and then cooperate most willingly with that authority who seems most promising. Such obedience is not only rational. It is a logical extension of the child's affirmative response to the vocation. The same holds for the policy chosen by the boy or girl who chooses to play the renegade. Suppose an answer to the calling that the child decides to seek, not the real good, but his own ends. Presumably, as a rational actor, he will then seek that adult authority who will maximize his selfish purpose. One thinks of Dickens Fagan as the adult prototype, but parents themselves can play a comparable role in the child's rational facilitation of evil. And even obtending parents can, on occasion, be manipulated. The child's purposes make their way by his rational enlistment of a cooperating authority. Conversely, the child who obtains, the one who seeks the correct way, performs his signature act of reason by giving trusting obedience to the authority she deems most likely to present her the real good. Again, that adult authority is almost always the parent, and it is emphatically an act of reason for the child to trust and to obey. On that same premise, as rationality flourishes and grows, the child who seeks the good will sometimes be forced to play the role of critic of her own parent. For in the end, it is her judgment that must determine. That is the child's, her own judgment. However, at least in the early years, it may be the most rational of all her judgments to give the parents a strong presumption of correctness. The strength of that presumption can and should diminish as the child approaches maturity, what could be more reasonable and perhaps relevant to lawyers. We'll see, thanks. Well, thank you for this special invitation, and it's a great privilege to be with you and to have this opportunity to reflect together today on the vocation of the child. Even though vocation or calling is a rather hot topic in academics and in the public, in popular culture, it's rarely mentioned in relationship to children. In contemporary culture, we tend to think about vocation or calling in terms that exclude children. Through my own work for a national initiative on vocation and even on my campus where I teach, we've found that there are at least three common conceptions of this notion of vocation or calling. And all of them leave out children. For example, many people equate vocation with one's occupation or career, a paid profession, something you do when you grow up and earn a living. Others think of vocation or calling as entering the priesthood or ordained ministry or becoming a monk or nun. My pre-seminary students sometimes say, for example, I received the call. And we all know what they're talking about or you'll look at these brochures for seminaries and they say, they talk about your calling in ministry or called to the religious life. And finally, still others simply equate vocation with vocational programs or Votek schools. For many people in the church and in my own field of theology, vocation or calling is a very rich spiritual term that embraces far more than the adult world of paid work, ordained ministry or vocational school. They would all claim that the concept of vocation rightly understood addresses some of our deepest human longings for purpose and meaning in life. For them, vocation encompasses the totality of our lives and the multiple ways that each one of us uses our gifts and talents to love and to serve others, whether at home, at work, in religious communities or in civic life. In other words, for them, vocation is a way of speaking about how we meaningfully participate in and contribute to God's care of the world and the common good. Even though vocation is understood in this way and refers to how all of us in various ways can contribute to the welfare of the community, most Christians and even most Christian theologians and ethicists, even the ones who are working for this national program on vocation, wouldn't say anything about the vocation of the child. This is in part because very few theologians and ethicists speak about children at all. Most of them have neither struggled directly in their work with issues regarding children nor sought to articulate sound theological understandings of children themselves. Certainly, they have devoted a lot of attention to issues related to children, such as abortion, human sexuality, gender relations, contraception, reproductive technology, marriage, and the family. However, they have not always developed rich, sophisticated teachings about fundamental subjects regarding children themselves, such as the nature and status of children, parental obligations to them, the role of church and state in protecting children, the role of children in religious communities, the moral and spiritual formation of children, and in turn, how children really shape the moral and spiritual lives of adults, or adoption, or the theme of children's rights and responsibilities. Contemporary theologians and ethicists have tended to consider issues regarding children as really beneath the work of the serious theologian, and as a fitting area of inquiry only for pastoral theologians or for religious educators. So for them, it's kind of like children is that's for the Sunday school teachers or for the church ladies. That's not for really serious thinkers. In my own denomination, even just to give another example, right now we're working on two statements for our church, social statements. One is on sexuality, and one is on education, and talks a lot about children. And there's been a lot of attention to the statement on sexuality, and they even call it the statement, and they talk about the other statement and there hasn't hardly any response to the one on education, and they call it the other statement. And I think that's kind of typical. So in general, in my discipline, theology, our discourse has been dominated by very simplistic and ambivalent views of children and young people that diminish their complexity and integrity, fostering in turn, narrow understandings of child-parent relationships. For example, some Christians today and in the past have tended to view or talk about children primarily as sinful or defiant or as ignorant, thereby restricting the way they talk about parental responsibilities to terms such as punishment, discipline, or instruction. Other Christians have perceived children mainly as innocent, almost like little angels, thereby enjoying children, yet often neglecting to talk about adult responsibilities of helping children develop morally and spiritually. These kinds of simplistic conceptions of children in the church inform and reflect other widely held perceptions about children may also find in contemporary culture. As several scholars have argued, and as really any glance at the magazine rack in your grocery store would tell you, we tend to depict infants and young children as pure and innocent beings whom we adore, and teenagers as hidden and dark creatures we must fear. Haven't you ever seen those pictures, you know, walking out of the grocery store? You know, there's always the little baby when they talk about brain development or child development, they'll have the cute little baby face. And when they start talking about teenagers, I mean, they are scary. They got the chains and they got the hair and, you know, they're frightening creatures. Even on something like Newsweek or Time. Children who are 12 or 13 fall somewhere in the middle. And thus, in cases of juvenile crime, we have public debates about whether or not they are victims of abuse or are they fully conscious criminals. Unfortunately, these kinds of simplistic views of children also affect our treatment of them. And in many ways, we do treat children as almost subhuman. For example, in our country, every person over 65 has healthcare, but nine million children do not. Affluent children have pretty good schools, but poor children are often forced to attend inadequate and sometimes even outright dangerous schools. Around the world, one child in every three seconds dies of hunger or a preventable disease. And many poor children are being used as laborers and factory workers, as soldiers, or as child prostitutes. I was just in a meeting in London with people who work at itch, ask risk children around the world. And we heard from the International Justice Mission in Washington that a million children a year are forced into child prostitution. That's a million new children every year. In the church, the most alarming example of injustices to children is that they have been sexually abused in reputations of priests or pastors, and this is not just the Catholic Church that has this problem, but those reputations have taken priority over child safety. However, children are neglected and treated unjustly in far more subtle ways in their congregations at homes. So today, what I'd like to do is explore briefly the vocation of the child by, first of all, describing one particular theological understanding of vocation that is broad enough to include children. And then I would like to articulate elements of a Christian understanding of vocation of the child. Although the vocation of the child is a neglected theme in theology and ethics, by critically reexamining the Bible and some elements of the Christian tradition, I found that the vocation of the child has at least six almost paradoxical elements. And further, each one of these elements is built on a complex understanding about the nature of the child, and each one is also coupled with corresponding duties and responsibilities of parents and other caring adults. So those three things are all combined, these duties, responsibilities and roles of the children, then you see how it reflects some understanding about the nature of the child, and what it says too about parental responsibilities and duties or the responsibilities of other caring adults. By examining these six elements, we discover that a robust understanding of the vocation of the child must be built on a vibrant theological understanding of children themselves. So let me say just a little bit about my starting point and understanding of vocation, and it will be a different kind of language than we just heard. Although theologians and ethicists have neglected the vocation of the child, some theologians in the past have reflected deeply on the central tasks and responsibilities of children, and they incorporated it into their wider view of what vocation or calling means. One of these theologians who also significantly shaped Protestant ideas about vocation was Martin Luther, the 16th century German reformer. In his view of vocation or calling, he emphasizes that all believers are called to love God and the neighbor. They are called to love and serve the neighbor, especially those in need. They are called to express their faith in works of love and service within the church and the broader culture. This is their common calling, their common vocation. We might talk about it as vocation with a capital V. Although Luther claims that all believers share this common Christian calling, he also emphasizes that they carry it out honorably in a wide variety of specific vocations, or smaller V, in specific stations or places of responsibility in which they serve the well-being of others, whether at home, at work, at church, or in civic life. Thus for Luther, they carry out specific vocations, for example, not only in their particular professions as doctors, lawyers, or pastors, but also in domestic life, in their roles as parents, spouses, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, and friends. For Luther, all of these varied and specific callings are vehicles of the general Christian calling to love and serve others. Furthermore, according to Luther, all work that benefits the community holds equal religious value, as he states in one treatise, quote, there is no true difference between laymen and priests, princes and bishops, between religious and secular, except for the sake of office and work, but not for the sake of status. They are all of the spiritual estate. All are truly priests, bishops and popes, but they don't have all the same work to do. Further, everyone must benefit and serve every other by means of his own work or office, so that in this way, many kinds of work may be done for the bodily and spiritual welfare of the community, just as all the members of one body serve one another. So with this understanding of vocation or calling, Luther would say, everyone has a calling, including children. Everyone has roles or offices, whether given or chosen, for in addition to our professional roles and duties, even our social and familial relationships, are places where God calls us to serve God and serve the neighbor. So even children, teenagers, students, law students have a calling here and now, even before they get a job or land a career. Whatever they age, whatever their age, they already have certain duties and responsibilities and roles that benefit the family and benefit the community. So what does the specific calling then of children look like? What are their specific roles, duties and responsibilities that contribute to the life of the community? What is their work? What is their office? And by examining the Bible and the Christian tradition, we find that it has these six dimensions I'd like to outline. And this is not an exclusive list. It's not exhaustive, but it's a start at trying to say what might the vocation, the specific calling of children look like? So first, throughout the Christian tradition, the most commonly cited duty of children is to honor and obey their parents. The fourth commandment is honor your father and mother and numerous biblical passages command children to honor and obey their parents. Many theologians have also said that children should honor their parents to such a degree that they regard them as God's representatives. Corresponding to this first duty of children are also particular assumptions about the nature of the child and about adult responsibilities and duties. This view assumes that children are dependent and vulnerable beings. And parents, in turn, have authority over them and are to love, serve and protect their children by primarily providing them with food, love, clothing and other basic needs. Luther says, for example, that children should acknowledge the authority of their parents and submit to them. They should honor their parents, in part, because their parents have done so much, basically, to keep them alive. God commands children to honor their parents because parents have nourished and nurtured them. They owe their parents body and life and every good. Without parents, a child would, as Luther says so delicately, a child would have perished 100 times in his own filth. Second, although almost all theologians today and in the past would say, yes, that's right, children should obey their parents. They often neglect a second and corresponding responsibility of children that is also part of the tradition, but often covered up. And that is that children have a responsibility and duty not to obey their parents if their parents or other adult authorities cause them to sin or to carry out acts of injustice. Although children should obey their parents, their ultimate loyalty is to God. Now, related to this second duty, again, is a particular understanding of children, that children are not merely dependent and vulnerable, rather, children are also made in the image of God, not primarily in the image of their parents. And they are active moral agents with growing moral capacities and responsibilities of their own. Since they are made in God's image, they are worthy of dignity and respect from the start. The basis of this claim is Genesis 1.27 that says, God made humankind male and female in God's image. And it follows that children, like adults, possess the fullness of humanity. They are not subhuman or almost human or on their way to being human, and we do find that language in the tradition. They are fully human beings from the start. Since children are fully human, moral agents who are made in God's image, and since their ultimate loyalty is to God, and not to any adult authority, parents and other caring adults must recognize that they are certainly not God's on earth, and their authority over children is always limited. It is never absolute. Although the Bible emphasizes, yes, children should obey their parents. It also warns parents, do not provoke your children to anger. Although theologians esteem parents, they also generally qualify absolute parental authority because they recognize that parents too are sinful, unjust, and sometimes they're just plain inept in some areas. They also recognize that as children grow and develop, their moral capacities and responsibilities also grow, and children must be prepared to challenge the authority of their parents, and even political and ecclesiastical authorities if they lead to injustices. So parents are given authority over their children, but this authority is limited, and it is never an excuse for treating children unjustly or unkindly or in failing to recognize that children are moral agents too, who already as children can challenge and benefit the community. And maybe you can think of some examples in your own experience where you've seen the courage of even young children. One example in our country is, for example, Ruby Bridges, who was just six years old when she marched through that angry and jeering crowd of adults who demanded segregated schools, but we could think of others or there's a very international working children's movement of children who are in child laborers and have come together to talk about their experience of injustice and have tried to work for social political change. A third part of a child's calling according to the Bible and tradition is to learn about and practice the faith. From an early age, children are to study God's law, to pray and to praise and worship God. Related to this third dimension of a child's calling is an understanding that children are developing beings in need of instruction and guidance, and that parents are to nurture the faith of their children. Several biblical passages speak about this parental responsibility. Parents are to train their children in the right way, teach them the love of God and bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Above all, children are to be examples to their children by living out their faith and convictions. They much teach them the way to go, not just speak about it or act out ways not to go. Now number four, although many theologians today in the past have emphasized that parents are to teach their children the faith and nurture them spiritually, and I think the first one we talked about, obeying parents and then this fact that parents should teach their children, those are the two most commonly mentioned duties, I think. But we often neglect a fourth dimension of a child's vocation that is mentioned in several biblical passages, and that is that children are called at times to teach adults, and they are to be models of faith for adults. This point is emphasized especially in the Gospels. Many Gospel passages turn upside down the common assumption held in Jesus' time and our own that children are to be seen but not heard, and that the primary role of children is to learn from and obey adults. In contrast, the New Testament depicts children in striking and even radical ways as moral witnesses, models of faith, vehicles of revelation, representatives of Jesus, and even paradigms for entering the kingdom of God. In the Gospels we see Jesus embracing children, rebuking those who would turn them away, healing them, and even lifting them up as models of faith. He identifies himself with a child and equates welcoming a little child in his name to welcoming himself and the one who sent him. Now given this understanding of children as teachers and models of faith for adults, let's look now at parental responsibility. Here we see that parents have a responsibility to listen to and learn from their children. They should take their questions and concerns seriously, and they are to pay attention to the lessons that children can teach them. The tradition often emphasizes a fifth duty or responsibility of children, and that is to go to school, to study well, and to cultivate their unique skills, gifts, and talents so that they can love and serve others and contribute to the common good in their future profession. This duty is tied to the idea of vocation and built on the notion that children are uniquely created with diverse gifts and talents that enable them to serve others, offering families and communities a lot of room for hope for the future. Thus, a major responsibility of parents is to help children discern, explore, and name their gifts and to provide them with a good education in the Jewish tradition, too. One of the major responsibilities of parents is to educate them for a trade or profession. Many theologians in both Jewish and Christian traditions have started or supported schools. They've fought for educational reforms and demanded that all children, including girls and the poor, which was not common just a few centuries ago, and even in some countries today, that they be given an excellent education as well. And finally, in the sixth place, although children are to cultivate their gifts and talents to serve others in the future, at the same time, they have a role here and now of strengthening and enlivening communities and families simply through their openness, playfulness, and the ability to laugh and to be in the present. This aspect of their calling or vocation isn't really a duty or responsibility, but it is a positive social role that they serve as children right here and now. And this part of their vocation is informed by a particular understanding again of children. Here we see children are gifts of God and sources of joy that parents should cherish, enjoy, and be grateful for them. And they should be grateful for them as they are now, not just for what they will become in the future. Many passages of the Bible speak of children as gifts of God or signs of God's blessing, and we all recognize that children have this wonderful sense of awe and wonder that delights and refreshes us. There's some very interesting philosophers, too, who talk about the way that children open up new possibilities for our thinking because they ask such fundamental questions about existence. They're kind of like the new people in a company and you're sitting around at the board meeting and the new person can always ask, why in the world are you doing things like this? And that's kind of the way some philosophers are talking about this fresh kind of questioning that children have. Well, this list of six elements certainly is not exhaustive, but even just these little six, if you hold them and keep them together in intention and hold them together, can build up a meaningful Christian understanding of the vocation of the child. I think a very big problem we see in the history of Christianity is that oftentimes, people take only one aspect I've talked about and talk about children in that aspect alone, and then that very much narrows your understanding not only of the child, but also of child-parent relationships. So again, if you think of children primarily as defiant, then what's the role of a parent? Well, to instruct or punish. If you think of children primarily as innocent, what's the role of the parent? Well, certainly to admire the child and enjoy the child, but maybe not take up responsibilities of training them. So this is a kind of a warning that if we could hold on to these six and more, we would have a much richer understanding of who children are as well as their roles and their calling, as well as the roles and duties and responsibilities of adults. And I think this view of vocation has tremendous implications for the church and for its treatment of children, and I won't talk about that now. I'll just close by saying that I've provided only a brief sketch of one possible Christian understanding of the vocation of children, yet even this brief sketch reminds all of us, whatever your religious convictions or backgrounds, that children too have vocations, like people of all ages, races, gender and social classes, children are meant to and already do participate in and contribute to the life of families and communities. Furthermore, any strong view of the vocation of a child can be built only by cultivating, at the same time, a vibrant and complex understanding of children themselves that includes attention, not only to their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, but also to the great strengths and gifts they bring to us. Finally, reflection on the vocation of this child certainly challenges all of us to think more seriously about our own duties and responsibilities to children, whether or not we have children of our own or plan to have children. I very much hope that this national project, headed by Brennan and Coon, and that our discussion here today can help us all become more aware of the situation of children here and around the world and to take up our own responsibilities for them with renewed passion. Thank you. Good afternoon. Greetings from the Big Apple, slightly rotten apple. Well, I'm a psychologist. I suppose that's my first confession. And I'm not gonna be talking about the child from the point of view of political theory, moral philosophy, or theology. This afternoon I'm going to try to summarize, as best as I can, the gist of the major psychological understandings of the moral life of the child, particularly the very young child and how it develops. I will be looking at two psychological traditions. One is rather roughly describable as psychoanalytic or neopsychoanalytic or sometimes object relations schools of psychoanalytic thinking and so forth. We're going to be very general. We won't worry about those terms, but it does come from the psychoanalytic tradition of observing children and talking to children in sessions, listening to their dreams, listening to their comments, watching their play, talking to their parents. And in addition, childhood experiences as reported in adult or relatively, let's say adult, say teenage patients. It's based on a lot of clinical observation. It is not especially scientific. The other tradition that I'll be looking at is the research, the actual studies that have investigated the development of the conscience and moral life of children, usually beginning about as early as they can get is usually about a year and a half. Normally it's a little bit later than that. And then on to preschool years. So we're going to be looking at the child essentially before what was traditionally called the age of reason. Now in doing this, I'm going to describe the concepts and the understanding, the relationship of this understanding to the theoretical issues that have already been raised, I leave up to you. Because frankly, the psychologists have been looking at children and their behavior or listening to them in sessions, they're miles away from many of these other issues. But I think the situation is perhaps ripe for the material that they've presented to begin to get integrated into the understanding of the child. But we're talking normally about the young child. And I begin with the psychoanalytic tradition. And here we're beginning in the first weeks of life and through up the first year. And here is a standard interpretation. I know there are different theoretical conflicts in here, but what I'm describing is relatively agreed to. The infant's first two experiences that can be termed psychological and moral are those of the good mother and the bad mother. These are the two first psychological experiences of the child and the first two moral experiences. The good mother is the child's experience of being well-mothered, beginning with nursing at the breast, but also including from the start the visual experience of the mother's face. This experience of being nursed, spoken to, soothingly, comforted, looked at lovingly, and so forth is what is meant by the term good mother. But the term refers not to the mother herself, but to the child's internal psychological representation of her. The good mother is an internalized phenomenon. The bad mother is the infant's experience of the mother as delaying or even denying gratification or of other negative experiences, such as communicated anxiety, coldness, or impatience. Again, the bad mother is the internalized representation of these negative experiences. Like most American psychoanalytic or psychoanalysts and psychologists, I assume these are primarily the result of the experience with the mother. Some continental psychoanalysts assume that these internalized images of the good and bad mother are something we are born with. Indeed, some of them say we are born only with the internalized image of the bad mother and that we are totally bad, totally depraved, I guess. It's not the American way. We don't have to ask ourselves whether these come from experience or whether they come from an internal structure. I'm pretty convinced there's something of both of it because there are predispositions that certain children seem to have that are distinct from their experiences. However, as the infant grows and develops mentally, he or she becomes capable of understanding that the good mother and the bad mother are the same person. It may take a few weeks or a few months. Some claim it occurs by as early as, say, six months. Some say it takes a little more than a year. But the cognitive maturation and the variety of experiences allow the two to be put together and you recognize this as the same person. The infant's psychological condition prior to the integration of the good and the bad mother is of particular interest. The representation of a person as all good or all bad is known as splitting. In the first few months of life, it is proposed that the infant has a split representation of the mother because some experience and cognitive development are necessary for the integration of the two. When the infant does succeed in integrating the two mothers, he or she has made a major advance in the mental life. After all, people are typically both good and bad and therefore this recognition represents a significant contact with interpersonal reality. And of course, this understanding of people as both good and bad will have to be maintained and developed throughout their life. However, the infant pays a significant price for this new, more mature understanding of its mother. The previous experience of the bad mother was accompanied by the infant's overt anger and hostility as it is readily observable in the crying and indeed the rage of many extremely young infants. In addition, psychoanalysts postulate that the infant's internal experience of the bad mother not only results in anger and hostility and resentment toward the mother but even in violent fantasies directed against her. Of course, the experience of the good mother makes the child feel contented, happy and good. And fortunately, the experiences of the good mother for most children far outnumber the opposite. The price of putting the two mothers together is the infant's recognition that the mother who was the source of love and goodness is also the mother that was hated and was attacked in fantasies. This uniting of the two emotionally laden contradictory representations of the mother creates depression and at times what psychologists term guilt in the age of a nine month old infant. This painful condition is overcome according to psychoanalytic theorists by what is called reparation. That is by an internal mental attempt to rebuild or repair the positive image of the mother. The baby now let us say a year old can also attempt small or primitive acts of kindness toward the mother, hugs, kisses, pats. Now so far we've been talking about the experience of psychological guilt derived from psychological experiences without any clear involvement in moral guilt. That is, I'll return to that issue later but nonetheless the structures that are being laid down are those that will provide the basis, I believe, for the genuine moral life. To summarize the logic so far, the human's first experience of goodness is of love, the mother's love, and the peace and joy associated with it. The first experience of badness is rarely of the mother as actively evil but far more commonly as absent. The child's reactions to the mother's absence of failure are anxiety, rage, and hatred. This emotional complex is the child's first experience of the bad. Thus the two categories of good and bad are experienced from the very beginning of life. They are also experienced as contradictions and their emotional substrates in the brain are different and probably mutually inhibitory. By the time the child reaches roughly the age of two, a new and more complicated response to good and bad develops. At this age the issue of obedience versus disobedience emerges in the well-known mode called the terrible twos. This issue arises no doubt in part because of further mental development but it is greatly facilitated by the child's ability to walk and talk. Walking and the greater mobility of the child mean that it can literally walk away and can say no. This is also the time when the ability of the child to get into physical trouble means that obedience to parents' commands is of the greatest importance for safety and indeed survival. Historically disobedience has presumably been a liability for survival. Nevertheless disobedience seems to be a common natural phenomenon at this age and it appears that it is also even a necessary response. Disobedience seems to be needed so that the child's own will is formed. Although the terrible twos represent a particular crisis period in the long run having a will is probably even more needed for survival than being perfectly obedient. In any case, traditional moral philosophy does not recognize a true moral choice unless the will is exercised. Thus a will must be formed first. Now let us go back to the issue of splitting, namely the early interpretation by the child of the good mother and the bad mother as separate individuals. As I said, the majority of children overcome this splitting by integrating them into a representation of the mother as both good and bad. However, it is commonly understood that some children fail at this task of integration. Since the mother is the prototype of other human beings whom the child will meet as this child grows up, it will continue to see others as all good and all bad. Sometimes the child will also vacillate between seeing a person as all good or all bad. Thus, this internal representation of the world is consisting of all good and all bad people, and I might add, I won't go into the psychological basis for it, but the representation of the self as all good or all bad without an integrative bridge is also characteristic of children who don't overcome splitting. Now this kind of failure is what is commonly understood as part of the problem in a certain kind of mental pathology known as borderline personality disorder, which is a serious disorder. And these are people who continually, all throughout their life, see others as all good or all bad. They commonly first see some people as all good, and then when any kind of rejection comes, any kind of trouble with that person, they flip to all bad and become intensely angry at them and rejecting. These people are seriously morally in trouble. There's a, it is as though the integration of good and bad as it comes out of the interpersonal experience of the mother is central to developing a later moral line. And I would also add that it's not just some of these mental cases who continue to see people this way. Many adults who are otherwise very normal, as soon as they run into one of their enemies who hurts them or treats them unjustly will do what is called splitting. I saw a bunch of Republicans and Democrats split during the last election. I never knew there were so many evil people in this country, both of which were political candidates. But all good and all bad, we split. And the overcoming of splitting is what a lot of things are about. For example, praying for your enemies. So that's a major moral issue, overcoming splitting. But what I'm trying to say here is that we recognize certain childhood experiences which have been proposed for borderline personality disorder development can lead to this condition where you are morally handicapped. And these are either severe childhood neglect, abuse, or sexual abuse. These have been linked to people who have this condition. So it's not exactly a level playing field for the moral development of a child who happens to have parents like that. Now I'm going through very quickly here. The next point I want to bring up at least briefly is the research on empathy. There is now a lot of evidence that the child's empathic response, beginning very, very young, is at the center of the development of the child's moral life, along with a positive, what's called a positive, secure, mutually orienting interaction between the mother and child. There's now a lot of research that shows that by the ninth to 14th month, this kind of relationship between the mother and child predicts early conscience development by age four or five, preschool. And that children who lack this have very, had poorer conscience development. And there are people who are seeing very clearly that the growth recently of a large number of adolescent, anti-social acting out individuals in our society, that when you look at their childhood, sure enough, they don't have these early bonding experiences with the mother. I have to move sort of rapidly here so I can't go into all the details of this. But that the failure of this mutually oriented responding to each other between mother and child and father and child and other members, which deals with empathic response and the development of the empathic response leads to people who can either be extraordinarily self-centered in the sense of anti-social and criminal or psychopaths. They have lots of reason. They have lots of intellectual knowledge, but they have no emotional, moral basis for identifying with the other. And if they can't identify with the other and understand their suffering, if they can't empathize, they can be cold-blooded, highly intellectual killers or psychopaths who are nice and friendly but lie a lot and don't worry about what it does to you and so forth. So Professor Coons has suggested a number of philosophical issues that are relevant to our conference. Two of them I have implicitly addressed here. One is, do children have the capacity to choose goodness itself on an equal basis? The psychological evidence doesn't look like that's the case because it looks like that if they have inadequate or destructive parenting, they are, if you will, morally handicapped or challenged. On the other hand, his criticism of a fair number of moral theories, moral philosophies, perhaps legal philosophies as well, that they are far too rational, far too intellectual, far too concerned with abstractions, I would say is probably correct. And the psychological literature on the importance of empathy, early mother-child interaction, on the essence of love and its opposite as at the center of the beginning of the moral life mean that psychologists just have something to offer to these theories by saying that in addition to reason and intellectual knowledge, the child must have an emotional, a moral basis for identifying with others and being able to understand their suffering in an empathic way if they're going to be able to get out of the egocentrism that can otherwise be well-rationalized by intelligence and intellect. Thank you. Three very rich and informative papers that have opened a kaleidoscope of issues for us. You have been very patient in listening to our three colleagues. I'd like to invite any and all of you here to put questions to one or more of the panelists and also invite the panelists to make any further comments to their colleagues. Those of you that wanna put questions or comments, if you would avail yourself of the two microphones at the middle of the auditorium and could you also abide by one of my favorite rules? Brevity is the soul of wit and the insistence of witty. Ha ha ha. Brief, profound questions by the panelists or by members of the audience, please. Madam. You're doing fine. I'm just an old guy. Professor Bungie, yes. For those that could not perhaps hear, is a vocation a condition for a right? We have to have, a child have to have a duty, a set of duties that we'd call a vocation before he or she can exercise rights. Professor Bungie. This language of vocation is just another way to talk about foundation. It's another way to speak about children that can bring us to the same place as people who talk about rights of children want to go. For example, if we say every child's made in the image of God and that's part of how we understand a child theologically, that can be the basis for thinking about all children have certain rights and responsibilities. So it's not the condition for speaking about rights or saying children have rights. It's another kind of theological foundation for speaking about concern for rights or concerns for our responsibilities to children and their responsibilities to the community. So again, it's not a precondition. It would be simply another kind of language and grounding for a discussion of rights or responsibilities, not only of children, but of the adults. Yeah, and again, I think your class is on rights and we were asked to talk about vocation of the child and this would be a meaningful conversation. This is a meaningful kind of vocabulary in a Christian tradition, although we do have a very interesting discussion going on with Jews and Muslims and their understanding of calling what is a call. And so from a religious, in religious communities, this would be a rich vocabulary. But I do think no matter what your religious background or philosophical convictions, this kind of discussion about what is a vocation of a child and using from a religious perspective can also prompt you, whatever your context, to think about how do we think about children is our view of children too narrow. Is even the language of rights sometimes too narrow to describe who and what a child is and what we as a community owe that child? So in a way for me, hearing different kinds of languages about children from different religious and philosophical communities can prompt all of us to re-examine what are our preconceptions about children, what are our assumptions about children and how might we expand those by hearing other philosophical religious understandings of the child and what does it say then about how we think about our own responsibilities. So we might come from different standpoints or different foundations to the same conclusions about what do we need to do, for example, internationally about child soldiers? What do we need to do about trafficking of young girls as prostitutes? But you want to come out of your convictions and it's a way then to encourage many communities to become involved in common issues that we face. May I invite further questions, please? To me, it is not a good virtue that we want a prize on this. May I react to that question, too? This is not particularly a rights question, a rights issue, perhaps. I am not an enthusiast of an indiscriminate use of the term rights, but I suppose one can imagine animals having rights, but in this case, you're talking about a certain kind of right, which is intellectual, free will, moral right. If the child has a vocation, the child is not a mere animal. The child is something else and the right will be shaped by the nature of the person for whom this right is intended. It may, for example, be of interest that children learn in a certain way from parents as opposed to large, depersonalized institutions. So you would want, now Plato liked, a certain kind of child raising apparatus. Maybe Plato was right, but maybe Plato was wrong. It's better to be with your own mother, or it may not. But in any event, that becomes an issue only because this is a free, moral person. And so you have to, it seems to me helpful to think in those terms, unless you happen to be a pure materialist, which is another way to go, but then you'll have to distinguish the animal from the human being somehow, and I'm not sure how you're gonna do it. Maybe I can amplify our colleagues' question, and it's one of the issues that we're gonna confront as we move toward our discussion of children's rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is looking, especially at the objections of the religious right generically understood with no pejorative intent, who's one of whose main arguments against the US ratification of the rights of the child is to concern that by giving children's rights, you are doing two things. You are compromising the development of their understanding of duty, and secondly, you're eroding the responsibility and rights that their parents have over them. And perhaps with these three distinguished theologically trained souls up here, we can get a little preview as to what that debate's about and whether that's simply a red herring, or in point of fact a legitimate argument that needs to be considered. Perhaps we can start with Professor Vitz on that question. You may sit down, please. I guess I'd say this. First of all, when you use the term child, because of the rapid development of the child, you have to be very clear about what age you're talking about. Are you talking about a one-year-old child? Convention makes no distinction. What? The convention makes no distinction. That's stupid. No, I mean, you know, it's truly ignorant, because children, I mean, are you gonna be talking about the unborn child? Does the child that's been aborted have a right? I mean, this is not trivial as to when what the age of the child is with respect to how we understand things, not only legally, but psychologically. And what I was trying to say here, I was looking at the very early, you know, the theories of early development, the first year up to maybe age three or four. It is possible in some fundamental sense that the position that Jack Coons has made that every child has the chance to choose to be good, that is to choose goodness independent of any particular choice of how it's expressed. It is possible that happens even at some weird time, like the first few weeks of life when they choose the good mother or not. But there's no way to find that out, as far as I know. There's no way to observe that. So the more plausible understanding is that until the child has intellectually matured or cognitively matured and has developed a will and a few other things, I can't imagine the child being morally responsible until, I mean, let's say four, five, I don't know. If in their heart, they've made a choice earlier than that and we can't observe any way to know it, you know, that seems to me pretty mysterious. But in any case, these children are going through rapid development from the first day they're born to eight or something like that, six, seven. And you better talk about the age of the child when they have the right. If a one-year-old has a right, who represents it? An eight-year-old, you can talk to. You know, there's a huge change in the nature of the human being in these early years and to not make a distinction between the ages and the developmental level of the child and things of that kind seems to me to be sort of left hemisphere imperialism. That is a kind of categorizing of people that are changing rapidly into one single thing. I see Professor Bungie writing furious notes, but let's put aside the question of exactly what stage of formation. Let's take the 13-year-old. Let's take the 13-year-old and deal with this religious rights objection that we're gonna hear in some detail next month. That rights language for children before they're emancipated is corrosive of their understanding of duty and deleterious to the rights of the parent. Professor Bungie, is that a plausible argument from the universe that you come from? Well, again, I've just come from this international meeting that was very interesting. A mix of very conservative and progressive Christians and in many of their communities they have absolutely said we don't wanna talk at all about children's rights and there's an anger even toward the United Nations in general. But a lot of the people working with that risk children was very interesting for me, want to hold up this language of rights even though they come from what you said so nicely, a more conservative and no pejorative term where their own religious communities would say we don't wanna talk about rights of the child at all but working with children at risk around the world who are in such poverty or have been used as child soldiers or child prostitutes, they want to pick up some of that language of rights. Why is that? First of all, they see from their own tradition and again, it's foreign for some of you where you talk about vocation but if you think about every person made in the image of God means every person has dignity and is a full human being. I mean, it sounds kind of ridiculous like, well, yes, of course we all know children are fully human but we don't act that way. Our laws don't certainly act that way. We don't reflect that insight and so if these people at this conference, they said, boy, the language of every child made in the image of God with dignity and value, that corresponds with some of this concern in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that children do have dignity. We need to give them respect and in certain ways they have rights but along with that, anytime you talk about children's rights, they've emphasized that adults, the community, and a lot of times the parents don't even have the economic resources to help children but that the community and parents have, along with the rights of the child, certain responsibilities towards those children so they don't want to give up that language completely and I think there's some wisdom in that because part of the Christian tradition has informed the language of rights in a certain way even though it's been narrow at the same time so I don't... Think about whether you want a world in which the 13-year-old can tell the parents, no, I'm not a Catholic, I'm going to become an atheist and I'm going to the local atheist society instead of your church. How's that for their family? Just think about it. Professor Jackson, congratulations, sir, on a brand new book, The Morality of Adoption which apparently is out this week or next. It's a wonderful book which I commend heartily to everyone in the audience. Thank you, John, I appreciate that. Out of herds, if you're interested. My question's two-part and I think it's primarily for Professor Vitz but I think everyone could address it. The first part is you spoke a lot about mothering and the good mother, bad mother. How gender-specific is that? Is that still just a regnant cultural constructor? Is there something biological that it is the mother rather than the father or could one, under certain circumstances, talk about the good father, bad father? That's part one. Part two is you mentioned that if you do suffer from splitting, if you don't synthesize the good mother, bad mother, good father, bad father perhaps, that the capacity for empathy perhaps won't develop and in turn the chances in the moral life are diminished. I wonder if you could talk about the psychological data on how remedial that is, meaning, is it after first two or three years if you're really poorly parented, your prospects are virtually nil or can that be repaired by future relations, by a rational, even a rational penitentiary system but you get the point. So part one, how gendered, part two, how remedial. Okay, on the gender issue, they're learning a couple of things increasingly. One, the mother is, in many respects, uniquely adapted to mothering the child, not only because, say, her oxytocin is gonna kick in to bond with the child, which men don't have, they have a corresponding thing that is not as strong, so she will bond much more to that child but she's also, so she'll be more attentive to it in the normal mothering. We're not talking about mothers who are psychotic or on crack or, you know, so forth, and they're out there and this is the, you know, okay, or where they're socially abandoned for whatever reason because of their environment. So there's a lot of evidence, particularly in the first year or two, that the mother's biologically very adapted for mothering the child. The father also is very important. It tends to come in a little bit later. And they're learning more and more things about the importance of fathers. I recently read a psych bulletin article and others were arguing that fathers are more important than mothers. I don't think that's, I don't wanna get into that. I think it's just a, you know, an evaluation. But there's hope. What? I was just saying there's hope. Yeah. But they're obviously both important. They have a different set of functions. They can overlap to a significant degree too. As to some of the more recent fathers who seem to be more involved in the first two years of their children, we don't have any research on those yet to make it, make any kind of conclusion based on findings. But the mother is, you know, she's softer. She's, her voice is more pleasant. She smells nicer. No, they just, women smell much nicer. They don't, they really don't. I ask, I ask in part because I think we're probably all aware of feminist, some feminist literature would encourage the idea of men can mother too. Others might argue there is really something distinct about the female. Well, there is, there is a basic difference. But you know, we got overlapped like we do with height and weight and all the rest of them. So, but there is a, and there's probably a different manner of dealing with a lot of other different issues and they make a compliment. Right. You can't throw out either half of God's image, okay? If I hear you correctly, then maybe it is not prudent to talk about men mothering. Men can parent too, women can parent too, but if I'm hearing you correctly, there may actually be a place for retaining fathering and mothering as specific in some way. Oh, I definitely think so. Yes, retaining them, yes. The androgynous parent is a ideological concept and we're finding out more and more about the biological differences that are complementary and kick in at different times in the development of the child. And what about that second part of the question? The second part, what do you do with somebody who has this splitting problem? You have laid down the basis of, here are two cases. One is a woman who was a girl, she was abused by her father and neglected by her mother and she's now diagnosed as having a serious borderline personality disorder. She's 20 years old. Unfortunately, there's not very much optimistic evidence on what to do with that. We know more about what might cause it, more about what it's like than we do at present about healing it or curing it. And this is the problem with many illnesses, biological or psychological. Once you got it, you're in trouble. So you try to prevent polio, you try to prevent TB, you try to prevent most, I mean, if you got smallpox now, you'd still be in trouble. But so once you get it, you're often in trouble. And so what we need is something more equivalent to a, well, 200 years ago, 100 years ago, we began what you would call public health with respect to the medical environment that could be improved. So we cleaned up our water supply, we improved food and so on and so forth and that did an enormous amount for improving people. Well, we're just beginning to understand the dynamics of family life, mother, child, father, child and so forth in a way that if we could find a way to improve the strength of the family, instead of one of the problems is you pick out different single units in the family and develop a program for them and you tend to break up the system of the family. And that's one of the reasons why people are concerned with the language for the UN thing about children and rights. The people whose family is functioning pretty well as far as everyone would agree are the ones who may have to pay a price when that law gets implemented. And so we don't understand yet enough but my guess is that sooner or later we're gonna understand that two parents in a stable family who love the child and who respond to it in a way that's neither permissive nor authoritarian. It's now called authoritative parenting style. There's a lot of research on that. Create the most fully functioning happy children. But if we could ever find a way to make that part of public mental health, I don't know, our existing program sort of develop ad hoc. We see a particular problem. We go in to solve it and we screw up the ecology of the rest of the system by doing it. Yeah, invite one final question from our colleague to my left and then we'll put that to the panel and we'll wrap up, please. Describe the children as independent intellectual beings and basically given the children a lot more responsibility for their own development. Doesn't that kind of erode some of the protection provided by treating them as children? Because I just find it interesting that a lot of the same language that you use to give children rights is the same language that's used by people who prey on children such as pedophiles by giving them responsibility for their own moral development and moral choices. Professor Coons, perhaps. My own view is that children will be dominated by big people, by and large. And the question then really is who is the best adult decider? And if you see what I mean, you can't escape a certain amount of mere physical domination and subjugation with children. There are people who speak in terms of kiddies' live and children's rights at the early stage. I have never been able to understand their writing. It seems to me that they simply ignore the natural facts of human bodies and lives, big ones and little ones, and experienced ones and inexperienced ones. Now, it is therefore, if we speak of rights for children, you have to speak of a right to the right decider for the child in issues that arise in the child's life. And you have to have a theory about who is the best decider. I have a theory, I'm not gonna lay it out now, but it's things like somebody who knows the child cares for the child and will be accountable if the child is injured or if the child suffers. They will suffer together. And there are other kinds of elements like this, but that's the way it seems to me, at least you have to approach it. Now, you can, if you want, take a kind of platonic view of things, take the child away, and in the name of liberty or something else, put the child under somebody else's subjugation. But as far as I can see, it's not the child's liberty. It's somebody else's liberty to do something to the child. And so you have to decide what you want done. We've certainly not exhausted this topic, but we have exhausted our time. And before we thank the panel, I wanna just make a couple of notes, if I may. First of all, for the students and the children's rights course, I look forward to seeing you again in a couple of weeks. We have my distinguished colleague, Yohan Vendorweiver, who'll be here talking about some of the comparative law and international human rights instruments on children. We'll be moving more and more gradually into the discussion of children's rights per se, which will be the dominant topic of the conference on October 20 and 21. Those of you that are observing Yom Kippur that day, please know that you are excused and we wish you Godspeed. Those of you that are contemplating conversion between now and October 13, we will view that conversion with a great degree of skepticism if it manifests itself and being excused from class. I also invite you, if you're new to the auditorium here, that if you are interested in work of our Law and Religion Center or the Children's Rights Conference in October 20 and 21, there are brochures and information outside. I want to thank a couple of colleagues that have been instrumental in pulling together the forum today, especially Anita Mann, Amy Wheeler, Corky Gallo, and Scott Andrews, and I hope you'll join me in a round of applause to thank them for their work. And please, a robust round of applause for our three panelists who are opening this world to us. Thank you, John. Thank you very much for being here. The preceding program is copyrighted by Emory University.