What children are owed. The Rights Convention at 34.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child turned thirty-four on November 20th. It is one of the most widely ratified international treaties in history — adopted by every country in the world except the United States. I have been thinking about it this week in the context of what I do in the clinic: paediatrics is, at its core, an applied version of children's rights. The question 'what does this child need?' is a rights question.

The Convention establishes several categories of rights that I want to name here, because I think parents who know them specifically are better equipped than parents who know them abstractly.

Survival rights: food, shelter, healthcare, the basic conditions of being alive. These are the most obvious and the most unequally distributed across the world. In wealthy countries, most children have them. In many parts of the world, many children don't.

Development rights: education, play, the conditions necessary for the child to develop to their potential. Play is in the Convention. It is Article 31. Not as an aspiration — as a right. Children have the right to play.

Protection rights: from abuse, exploitation, violence, the specific vulnerabilities of childhood. These are the rights most frequently violated in both rich and poor countries — in different forms, but violated.

Participation rights: the right to a voice in decisions that affect the child's life, proportional to their age and capacity. This is the right that most surprises parents when I describe it. Many parents have not considered that a child has a right to be heard in family decisions.