Concerning Children by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The one main cause of our unfairness to children is that we consider them wholly in a personal light. Justice and equity, the rights of humanity, require a broader basis than blood relationship. Children are part of humanity, and the largest part. Few of us realise their numbers, or think that they constitute the majority of human beings. The average family, as given in the census returns, consist of five persons, -- two adults and three minors. Any population which increases has a majority of children, our own being three-fifths. This large proportion of human beings constitutes a permanent class, -- another fact we fail to consider because of our personal point of view. One's own child and one's neighbour's child grow up and pass out of childhood, and with them goes one's interest in children. Of course, we intellectually know that there are others; but to the conscious mind of most persons children are evanescent personal incidents.

The permanence of childhood as a human status is proven by the survival among them of games and phrases of utmost antiquity, which are handed down, not from father to son, but from child to child. If an isolated family moves into a new country, and its children grow up alone, they do not know these games. We should bear in mind in studying children that we have before us a permanent class, larger than the adult population. So that in question of numerical justice they certainly have a right to at least equal attention. But, when we remember also that this large and permanent class of human beings is by far the most important, that on its right treatment rests the progress of the world, then, indeed, it behooves us to consider the attitude of the adult population toward the junior members of society.