The United Nations 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) uses the phrase “best interest(s) of the child” no fewer than five times in the course of its forty substantive Articles.
1 But the meaning of this phrase continues to be a topic of intense debate, not least in America, which is one of only two member countries yet to ratify the UNCRC. To be sure, much of the document’s content is non-controversial for nations on all points of the political and economic spectrum. Few would dispute that it is in the best interests of children anywhere to be protected from abuse, neglect, slander, family separation, or arbitrary imprisonment.
2 In addition to such ‘negative rights’ most people would affirm many of the UNCRC’s ‘positive rights’ as being in the best interests of children, such as the right to a name and nationality. And although there are understandable differences – both by nation and sub-culture -- regarding the appropriate level, pace of implementation, and sources of funding for other child-friendly services such as education, health care and social security, most people would in principle probably endorse some form of these positive rights as well.
3However, other parts of the UNCRC are more controversial. Both legal and theological scholars have noted that Article 5 seems to reduce parental rights to merely advising and facilitating their children’s exercise of the rights listed in the document – rights that Article 2 states are applicable (inter alia) regardless of the child’s sex, language, or religion.
4 Despite its recognition of adult-child differences in phrases like “the evolving capacities of the child,” Article 5’s language, coupled with that of Articles 12-16, suggests to some that children should have virtually the same rights as adults to privacy, court representation, and freedom of thought, expression, association, conscience and religion.
5 Moreover, as theologian Don Browning notes,
[W]hat if parents believe there is more to life – its meaning, morality, and virtues – than can be found in or confined to the Convention? Do parents have a right to guide and direct their children towards these values? Do parental rights exist only insofar as they reinforce the principles and values granted in the Convention?6
Browning notes that earlier UN documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)
7 were much clearer on “the priority of parents in relation to the state, law and market ... [The UDHR] states that government should support and guide parents, but government must not replace or undermine parents’ responsibilities,”
8 nor their right to influence the content of their children’s developing conscience, religious beliefs and opinions. Largely under the influence of Lebanese philosopher and statesman Charles Malik, the UDHR recognized, to a greater degree than subsequent UN documents, that rights and responsibilities pertain not only to individuals (of whatever demographic category) but also to various relational activities -- or institutions, or spheres of life -- such as family, government, market, labor, scholarship, the arts, etc. Indeed, Browning cautions, without such a balanced recognition of both ‘subjective’ (individual) and ‘objective’ (relational) rights, contemporary rights talk is all too often reduced to arguing about “list[s] of subjective natural rights ... in which these rights increasingly seem to contradict each other, sow seeds of distrust or disregard among the nations of the world, and get used as tools of manipulation by various interest groups around the world to accomplish their own particular political and legal goals.”
9To avoid such distortions, and to promote the ‘best love’ – not just the ‘best interests’ – both of children and by children toward others, legal scholars, social scientists and others may benefit from an introduction to theological traditions which affirm not only the autonomy, or ‘sovereignty,’ of individuals, but also of certain creation-based – yet fallen and retrievable -- social institutions, including the family. Understanding families and children in this theological light does not negate the insights of other disciplines, such as cultural anthropology and evolutionary psychology, but it does help to avoid the hazards of moral relativism -- now inflated by various currents of postmodern thought
10 -- that accompany the former and, oppositely, the risk of conflating of what seems ‘natural’ with what is desirable in the latter. After briefly sketching this theological tradition, I will turn to the relatively newer field of cross-cultural psychology, whose theories and empirical research carve out a ‘third way’ between the extremes of cultural relativism and biological determinism. I will demonstrate how its conclusions about children and families – with a special emphasis on gender relations -- overlap with the theological-ethical portrait summarized below.
A Brief Theology of Sphere SovereigntyThe insistence that individual and institutional rights and responsibilities must be kept in normative balance has a long history in western Christian thought. Predating the emergence of individual rights language in liberal political theory, such discussion took on new meaning during the Protestant Reformation, influenced by the Christian humanism which preceded that movement, and the gathering forces of modernity that accompanied it. Both Luther and Calvin rejected medieval Catholicism’s sacred/secular dichotomy, according to which contemplative religious life was the highest and most enduring human activity, and the so-called secular spheres of family, commerce, the arts etc. were inferior institutions – practically necessary but eschatalogically temporary, since humankind’s ultimate telos was seen as the contemplation and glorification of God in eternity. But for Luther – the erstwhile monk turned family man – all ‘vocations’ or spheres of human activity had religious significance, not just because they are necessary to support inferior, bodily needs, but because of their place in creation and redemption.
For Luther, human work -- paid or unpaid, whether as parent, tradesman, artisan or governing official -- neither debases people to the level of animals nor (contra some humanists) elevates them to the status of gods. On the contrary, he wrote, all honest and necessary human activity has significance both providentially, as the way God calls humans to care for the earth and each other, and redemptively, as through its challenges humans imitate in a small way the sufferings Christ endured for them. In his commentary on Genesis, Luther noted that God even milks the cows through those called to that work
11 In the Lutheran view of vocation, as summarized by philosopher Lee Hardy,
Having fashioned a world filled with resources and potentials, God chose to continue his creative activity in this world through the work of human hands ... Through our work, humble though it may be, people are being brought under God’s providential care. For God established the various stations of earthly life as channels for his love and providence for the human race; when people respond to the duties of those stations in the activity of work, God is present as the one who provides us with all that we need ... As we pray each morning for our daily bread, people are already busy at work in the bakeries12
Luther’s concept of ‘stations’ or ‘vocations’ anticipated the later Calvinist concept of ‘sphere sovereignty’ and Catholic social teaching on ‘subsidiarity.’ Developed particularly in response to the challenges of the industrial revolution and increasingly centralized states, both traditions reaffirmed a range of God-ordained spheres of activity that have providential purpose for human life, and so need to operate freely according to their own inherent norms. In other words, certain essential ‘scaffolds’ of the common life – such as religion, family, education, labor, science and art – must be arranged and protected to accomplish their unique functions, without being overwhelmed by the state or the market, ignored in the pursuit of individual freedom, or reduced to one another. Late 19th-century Calvinists like Abraham Kuyper
13 and Catholics such as Pope Leo XIII,
14 warned of the need to preserve a civil society of such autonomous institutions, to mediate between the modern extremes of atomistic individualism and the potential for both state and market totalitarianism. Indeed, in Kuyper’s rendering of sphere sovereignty, a major task of government is to act as honest broker between the other spheres: to make sure that each gets what it needs (no more, but also no less) to fulfill its unique social mandate.
15The assertion that ‘objective’ or relationally-based rights and responsibilities are no less important than ‘subjective’ or individually-based ones may strike some modern readers as quite novel. Most social science students are familiar with Max Weber’s thesis that Protestant Calvinists, with their insistence on an unmediated relationship between God and humans, helped to advance both capitalist and individualist values and behaviors.
16 Fewer are aware of their continuing efforts to keep individual freedom in normative balance with the rights and responsibilities of what they took to be God-ordained institutional spheres. The steady march of functional and/or legal separation between religion and state in Calvinist-descended nations has resulted in an emphasis on individual rights that has largely marginalized the Reformed theology of institutional sphere sovereignty.
17But at the dawn of the Protestant Reformation (when social and geographic mobility were still rare) station-based obligations were simply taken for granted – so much so that most individuals were expected to serve God and neighbor by blooming exactly where they were planted. Despite his expanded theology of vocation, Luther retained this medieval image of a static society, to the extent that he supported the German territorial princes when they brutally suppressed the peasants’ revolt against an increasingly crushing tax burden. Luther and the princes assumed that sin was largely reducible to the failure to do one’s individual duty in the station in which one found oneself. It was Luther’s Calvinist successors who pointed out that social stations, even when God-given, are also shaped by human finitude and sin, and so may be in need of reform:
Whereas for Luther our vocation is discerned in the duties of our station in life, for the Calvinists it is derived from our gifts. We have a duty to use our talents and abilities for our neighbor’s good. Therefore we are obliged to find a station in life where our gifts can indeed be employed for the sake of our neighbor’s good. That station is no longer itself normative, but must be judged by it suitability as an instrument of social service. If it is found to be faulty or ill-adapted to its end, it must either be altered or discarded altogether. We must not only serve God in our calling; our calling itself must be brought into alignment with God’s Word.18
How have subsequent theologians dealt with the challenge of advancing the freedom of individuals to use their gifts as they see fit, without at the same time undermining the sovereignty of institutions such as the family? Reformed and Catholic thinkers – as well as many Orthodox theologians -- broadly agree on the following points:
19
- Human beings have both negative and positive individual rights. These are rooted in their dignity as imagers of God, and the higher capabilities -- both cognitive and relational -- that they have received from God. As variously gifted participants in God-ordained relational spheres, including families, humans also have individual responsibilities: they are called to use their talents in God’s service, as they exercise responsible dominion over creation, and strive to love their neighbors as themselves. Both of these mandates are qualified by life stage and external circumstances, since human beings share the limitations of embodiment with other creatures, even though they uniquely carry the image of God.
- Because humans are fallen as well as finite, their freedom cannot be absolute, as it can be misused both intentionally and unintentionally. Among other things, such ‘freedom’ needs to operate within the ‘forms’ of institutional life -- including families -- whose inherent rights and responsibilities must be kept in balance with those of the individual, so that both individuals and societies can flourish.
- Being populated by finite and fallen human beings, institutional spheres can also fall short of the biblical standards of justice, according to which all creatures and creation-based activities should receive the respect and resources they need to operate for the welfare of God’s whole creation.20 Institutions can be perverted internally (for example, if there is corruption in government, abuse in the family, or worker exploitation in business) or externally (as when the church tries to dictate theories to scientists, or when the state tries to replace the family). But such distortions mandate not the elimination of any of the spheres that are essential scaffolds for human welfare, but their reform and renewal according to Scriptural principles of justice, appropriately adapted to various times and places in history.
Correlations With Cross-Cultural Psychology:What relevance has cross-cultural psychology to a theology about the normative balance between individual and institutional rights and duties, especially in relation to children and families? Cross-cultural psychology, as a spin-off from the earlier field of social psychology (and with some influence from anthropology) began to carve out its own empirical and theoretical domain only in the latter third of the twentieth century.
21 Thus a few words about its terminology and approach may be helpful before I demonstrate its overlap with the theological traditions described above, and some of its empirical work on families and children that supports this. I begin with what distinguishes cross-cultural psychology from related work in cultural anthropology.
The terms ‘culture and personality’ and ‘psychological anthropology’ usually refer to a body of work done by cultural anthropologists in the early to mid-20th century, mainly using a Freudian psychodynamic paradigm. The term ‘cultural psychology’ is more recent, and refers mostly to research done -- or inspired by -- cultural anthropologists, but from a more strictly relativist or (in more technical parlance) emic perspective. According to this approach, cultures are so uniquely constructed by their members over time, and in response to such unique circumstances, that they must be studied largely on their own terms, using categories of analysis generated from within. Scholars in this camp tend to reject the use of any Western theories (e.g., psychoanalysis, Piagetian cognitive-developmental theory, Kohlbergian moral developmental theory) for use in studying pre-modern cultures, including their familial and childrearing practices. This of course would also exclude any kind of ‘Western Christian’ theological framework such as the one described earlier. They also tend to reject the use of quantitative methods (psychometric, correlational, experimental or quasi-experimental) as being inappropriate tools – smacking of Western imperialism -- for studying pre-modern cultures.
By contrast, cross-cultural psychologists have felt free to use theories and methods generated by mainstream Western psychology, but not to use them in an absolutist, or imposed etic fashion. Rather, both theory and method are adjusted as experience in the target culture(s) warrants. The assumption here is that human beings universally do share certain needs, capabilities, and developmental paths, both as individuals and as cultural groups. Thus cross-cultural psychologists do not see it as inappropriate to do cross-cultural comparisons while searching for common patterns, or to use Western-derived quantitative and qualitative methods. At the same time, the fact that environmental challenges and resources – as well as cultural histories – do differ means that adjustments in both theory and method are inevitable and ongoing.
22 Cross-cultural psychology’s general mandate is thus to explore just how much behavior and psychological processes, including those involving children and their socialization, vary according to cultural constraints, from those faced by pre-modern, subsistence-level groups to those at increasingly higher levels of industrialization and urbanization, and now even in post-industrial settings.
This ‘third way’ between unreflective Western ethnocentrism and the presumption of strong cultural relativism is commonly referred to as the ‘universalist’ or derived etic approach. It is an extension to the cultural level of the mid-20th century dictum by Harvard social theorists Henry Murray and Clyde Kluckhohn, who famously noted that every person is in certain respects like all other persons, like some other persons, and like no other persons.
23 It also represents a third way between “the dogmatic and ideological traps of those biomechanistic evolutionists who are inclined to see any coincidence as a causal relationship [and] those environmentalistically minded social scientists who cling to the view that the biological basis is largely irrelevant to the study of what is typically human in behavior.” On this account,
[t]he human species is morphologically and physiologically quite similar to other species, but the extensive facility for conscious reflection and the formulation of long term goals and plans that can be reached along a variety of routes adds a dimension to human behavior not found to the same extent in other species ... Genes [are not] a deterministic force that preempt moral choices ... Biologically speaking, we cannot really go against our genes, but the observable behavior repertoire is the outcome of a range of possible re
