Society should consider the goals of radical youth programmers of this ilk when it contemplates handing over adult-style rights to children, says Richard Wilkins, an international law expert and professor of law at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City. No single group is spearheading the drive for children's autonomy, the Utah specialist comments. Rather the kids' rights movement creeps forward like the tide advancing across a mud flat, with different bureaucracies and pressure groups promoting the same goals for their own institutional purposes. The Canadian children's referendum is just another case of this ad hoc but effective promotion, the professor warns. But developmental scholars will tell you otherwise.
Children are malleable.
They will be influenced. This whole debate is not about children having rights. It's about who is going to mold each new generation. On the one hand, according to this specialist, are parents and, in some cases, their chosen churches. The opposing contenders are hired hands in government bureaucracies, themselves pressured by social workers, feminists, homosexuals and other special interest lobbies.