Children's rights are a key reference point for common understandings of kid power. The history of children's rights goes back to the early twentieth century, with intermittent international commitment to supporting children's welfare (Wyness, 2019). There was a libertarian moment in the 1970s when a group of academics argued that children should be empowered to escape the ‘shackles of childhood’ by offering them a range of civil and political rights (Holt, 1975; Farson, 1978). However, it is the relatively recent version of children's rights, the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which has had most impact, heightening – sometimes controversially – the position and condition of children globally. The CRC is a legal document obligating nation states to respect the integrity and status of children as human beings. It has been ratified by all UN member countries, except the United States, and adopted by a multitude of national and international agencies, resulting in children becoming an integrated part of the global discourse on childhood. The global focus has been on children's rights to provision, protection and participation (Franklin and Franklin, 1996), with the latter often singled out as a distinctive and controversial feature of the CRC. Participatory rights have sometimes been associated with an increase in child power and a shift in power relations between children and adults. This chapter explores the question of whether the greater global focus on children and their rights has led to an increase in kid power.

The chapter focuses on two related themes in teasing out the difficulty of equating rights with power. First, the CRC developed as a result of increasing realisation of the suffering of children in conflicts and in poor living conditions due to their age-related vulnerability. Consequently, it emphasises the role of adults, institutions and states providing for and protecting children: