The Child as a Person in his Own Right

CHILDREN ARE PRESUMED BY LAW TO BE INCOMPLETE BEINGS DURING the whole period of their immaturity. Their utter inability to fulfill their own basic needs, or even to maintain life without extraneous help, justifies their being automatically assigned by birth

certificate to their biological parents or, where this natural relationship fails to function, by later Court proceedings to parent substitutes. Responsibility for the child, for his survival, for his physical and mental growth, for his eventual adaptation to community standards thus passes from the jurisdiction of the State to that of the designated adults to whom the child, in his turn, is responsible for his behavior, his misdemeanors, etc.

This state of affairs on the legal side is matched on the psychological side by a number of tenets, some of old standing, some new, such as the following:

that a child's mental reliance on the adult world is as long-lived as his physical dependency;
that each child's development proceeds in response to the environmental influences to which he is exposed;
that his emotional, intellectual, and moral capacities unfold, not in a vo