„Kinderrechte sind Sachen, die Kinder haben sollen, damit sie glücklich leben“: (Kinder‑)Rechtsvorstellungen von Grundschulkindern

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is one of the reasons why children have to deal with and know about children’s rights. So far, there are hardly any findings on children’s ideas about their rights. This article examines the understanding of 3rd and 4th grade students about (children’s) rights and what relevance they assign to (children’s) rights. For this purpose, 59 children of the 3rd and 4th grade were interviewed. The interviews were evaluated using qualitative and quantitative content analysis. The results show that the students do not (yet) have an established understanding of rights but do have a partial understanding of children’s rights and that although the children’s attribution of the relevance of (children’s) rights varies greatly, they can certainly name relevant functions of rights, in particular, children’s rights. Overall, children’s conceptions of their rights and the relevance of it are shaped by individual children’s rights, which mainly refer to protection and provision rights. The results are discussed and further research desiderata are identified.