This chapter argues that, because moral philosophy has approached the question through an implicitly adult-normative lens, it has struggled to articulate the inherent value of children. Historically, philosophers have understood human value by reference to cognitive capacities most visible in adults, leaving the child—whose interior life has been largely inaccessible for most of history—without an anthropology of her own. As a result, the value of children has been assessed not in their childness but by reference to adultness: as possessions valued through their parents’ interests, as apprentices valued through their partial resemblance to adults or as potential adults valued according to what they might later become. The chapter examines each of these accounts, showing how notions of possession collapse care into ownership, how ‘adults-in-training’ models reduce present value to developmental progress and how arguments from potential—whether probabilistic or conceived as the child’s nature—struggle to confer full present value. Each ultimately reflects the same systematic bias: that only adult characteristics confer personhood. The chapter concludes that such adult-normative thinking inevitably undervalues infants, in whom childness is most pronounced. A coherent bioethics must instead begin from the normative characteristics of children themselves, recognising the infant’s present flourishing as intrinsically valuable rather than as a mere precursor to adulthood.