The analysis of the book is couched largely in terms of rights – what moral rights children have in connection with state decision making about their relationships and what legal rights they should have, as well as what rights any other persons should have in connection with such decision making. Most people in western society are, I think, quite comfortable with the idea of children having rights and with moral reasoning about what legal rights they should have. But some have reservations of one sort or another about thinking in terms of rights when discussing child welfare policy, and I want to try to remove that obstacle up front.

One concern can be eliminated very quickly. There is some tendency to assume that any argument for children's rights must amount to an argument for empowering children to run their own lives without adult interference. If one had that understanding of rights, one would be understandably resistant to the idea of attributing rights to young children in connection with, for example, termination of parent–child relationships. A claim that five-year-olds should be entitled to choose to “divorce” their parents would suffer from a seemingly insurmountable facial implausibility. Let me emphasize at the outset, then, that I am deploying an understanding of rights, consistent with common usage, whereby rights can be protections of persons' interests independently of any choices they make. In fact, we can attribute to children certain rights to protection of their interests even against choices they make.