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Advancing health and well-being through children’s rights

Many of us are committed to ensuring that children’s rights are at the heart of the care we provide, the research we undertake, the decisions we share, the services we deliver, the curricula we create to educate future health professionals and the way we engage with children. As adults caring for and committed to improving the lives, health and well-being of children, we can find ourselves working in a complicated world that challenges our beliefs in children’s rights and our ability to ensure that we meet our obligations as ‘duty bearers’. In our work, we are often guided by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (1989) and call on this seminal document to help identify deficits and drive improvements forward. However, there are also occasions when even the best of us find that our commitment can be more rhetorical than actual and active. It is easy to become complacent in thinking that our own organizations are doing ‘OK’ compared to other organizations and especially where a commitment to children’s rights is claimed as almost a ‘given’ (Kelly et al., 2012). However, this commitment can be inconsistent and the implementation and operationalization of children’s rights is rarely fully embedded into organizations, settings and daily practice. There is considerable evidence that reflects how children’s rights are overlooked in both extreme situations such as children living within a war zone and within more every day, mundane health care and social situations. Lack of attention to children’s rights can be seen in the lack of equitable provision of opportunities for disabled children to engage in mainstream social activities (Knight et al., 2014). Within health care settings decisions about children are all too frequently made without their involvement. For example, Carpenter et al.’s (2014) study showed low levels of engagement by physicians with children with asthma in discussions about their treatment. One of the assumptions underpinning children’s rights is that the UNCRC is indisputably the ‘last word’ on children’s rights. For those of us aware of how far we still have to go to address and embed children’s rights into practice, it can feel worrisome to question and critique such a seminal document as the UNCRC. However, if we are to advance children’s rights globally, then it is important that we read, absorb and add our voices to the critiques of how children’s rights are currently framed and acted upon. This can feel somewhat disconcerting. The UNCRC is a product of its time and Cordero Acre (2012) writes powerfully about how: