In a world where children as young as seven can set up social media accounts and influence shopping trends, adults are increasingly grappling with a difficult question: when should we listen, and when should we lead?
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is clear: children have the right to be heard (Article 12) and the right to protection (Article 3).
But in real life, these rights often pull in different directions. Particularly in the digital age, where children’s voices are amplified by smartphones and platforms but their mental wellbeing is under increasing pressure, this tension has never been more relevant.
The right to be heard means more than just letting children speak. It means ensuring their views are taken seriously in decisions that affect them. This is crucial in everything from family court hearings to the design of classrooms and educational resources.
But developmental science shows us that while children can form views from a young age, their ability to reason about long-term consequences or resist peer pressure is still maturing well into adolescence.
Asking a 10-year-old to make an informed decision about screen time limits or online privacy is like expecting them to drive a car after watching someone else do it.
That doesn’t mean we ignore them. It means we support their voice with guidance, context and care.
As with learning to walk or read, using your voice responsibly is a skill that needs scaffolding. This has huge implications for co-creation of children’s facilities, products and content, and community engagement exercises—listening isn’t enough.
Children may need help with sharing their views. The route from hearing children to policy or product design isn’t straightforward either. Adults may need to interpret their views in the light of practical considerations, long term goals, children’s own wellbeing and other sections of the population’s needs.
There is a danger that listening to children is assumed to mean giving them what they want—and that’s not the case, as any parent who asks a kid what they want to do at the weekend and gets told they want to go to Disneyland knows.
Many parents face daily battles over mobile phones. Children argue that they have a right to connect with friends, express themselves and explore the world. And they do. But alongside that right comes a mountain of research highlighting the risks: poor sleep, low self-esteem, exposure to harmful content, and rising levels of anxiety and depression.
Government policies are slowly catching up. The UK’s Age-Appropriate Design Code was a step toward protecting children’s data online. But implementation remains patchy, and tech companies often lag behind in truly child-centred design.
Child rights advocates emphasise the importance of supported decision-making: giving children choices within safe boundaries. Developmental psychologists urge adults to act as co-pilots, not just observers, until children’s cognitive and emotional skills are better developed. Meanwhile, tech companies walk a fine line between child empowerment and ethical responsibility
Parents and teachers are left in the middle, trying to balance these ideals in real time. When should a child’s preference be the deciding factor? How do you tell the difference between a child being assertive and a child being exploited?
One helpful tool is the Lundy Model of child participation, which emphasises four dimensions: giving children space to form views, providing them with a voice, ensuring there is an audience for their views, and making sure those views influence decisions.
Alongside that, we need to use best interests frameworks, commonly applied in law and safeguarding, to assess each situation with nuance and compassion. Are the consequences of acting on the child’s view developmentally appropriate? Is the child being supported to understand the context? And if they are not developmentally able to understand a concept, is it unfair, even cruel to suggest to children that their views will inform decision-making?
When consulting with children to obtain their views, it’s vital that factors that can bias results (e.g. ecological validity, inter-observer reliability, primacy and recency effects, social desirability and observer effects) are managed as well as possible in order to ensure that children are expressing their own opinions, are not being swayed by power imbalances or a desire to give a ‘right answer’ and that their actions are authentic and representative of their normal, everyday behaviour. There is little value in an unfamiliar adult with a clipboard asking a young child a series of questions – their answers won’t be authentic or representative of their opinions, actions or thoughts outside of that specific environment and a lack of context will render the responses pretty meaningless, and potentially even misleading. So obtaining children’s views ethically and reliably isn’t easy. Just think about the last time a doctor asked you how much you drink, smoke or exercise and the accuracy of the response you give – getting honest, reliable data from adults is tricky enough, from children it’s a whole different ball game.
Respecting children’s rights doesn’t mean letting them make every decision. It means creating environments where they are listened to, taken seriously, and guided with care. It means seeing children as capable, but also recognising when they need help carrying the weight of complex choices.
Pulling back too far from protection is not respect, it’s neglect. And silencing children under the banner of safeguarding is not safety, it’s disempowerment.
We need to keep asking: whose choice is it really, what support does the child need to make it wisely, and how can we assess what children really think and understand about a given issue?
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