Core Elements of a Good Childhood

The following reconstruction and definition of a good childhood is concerned with clarifying what constitutes a sufficiently good, not an ideal childhood. The core elements of a good childhood that we name below define minimum and necessary requirements for assessing a childhood as better or worse. We are not interested in constructing ideal worlds or utopian ideal states, but in identifying realistic possibilities for improvement, for understanding what belongs to a childhood that is good enough. The core elements of a good childhood can be pieced together in different ways and various priorities can be set. However, if not all requirements are met to a minimum extent, one cannot speak of a sufficiently good childhood. We thus take a sufficiency-oriented, threshold-based position, which assumes that a good childhood is characterized by the sufficient realization of objectively valuable childhood goods that are suitable for the absolute and comparative assessment of children’s well-being. With the help of these goods, we show that children’s rights, their claims to justice, and the associated duties of adults toward children can be established (such as a right to basic education). However, we should recognize that the childhood goods we name are not all distributed in the same way, nor can they all be easily codified in law (such as love, even if there have been attempts to establish a “right to be loved” (Liao, 2015); cf. Chaps. 4 and 5 ).