Children and Childhoods

The purpose of this book—to answer the question: What is a good childhood?—will to some seem overly ambitious and even attract skepticism. The aim of this chapter is to address some of the possible reasons for such skepticism and, if possible, to refute them. In doing so, we refer to several central debates in the philosophy of childhood and set out some of the fundamental normative and methodological starting points for our argument. Among the most important reasons why one might be skeptical of our book’s mission are problems arising from the historical contingency, changeability, and normative relativity of childhood, addressed in Sect. 2.1; its status as a social construction; and the normative character and status of childhood as a concept and a human phenomenon. We address each of these points in Sects. 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3, respectively. In working through these problems, we develop an ethical account of childhood that is sensitive to the unique tasks, possibilities, and limits of childhood. The account clarifies how to grapple with pluralism regarding how to shape a good childhood, what positions it takes up in public debates about children and childhood in a liberal democracy, and what justificatory premises we should proceed from to construct a normative theory of childhood (Sect. 2.4).