Children’s power to challenge authority

Child rights can be considered through the different characteristics of human rights, according to the classification “3P” as Protection, Provision, and Participation. The (potential) distinction between child rights and human rights recalls the former perspective about children’s not seen as human beings. The development of the fields on childhood studies such as “children’s participation” and “agency” are also related to the concept “empowerment,” which indicates the power relations between children and grown-ups. The main purpose of this paper is to debate all those notions through the children’s own experiences by referring to various examples in the frame of Power of children as the Fourth-P right. After discussing how children have the power to “challenge the authority,” I will indicate some examples from Little Review, as a remarkable experience of children’s participation. Lastly, I will try to reveal what today’s children consider the topic of child rights by sharing the findings of a pilot research with children, which I realized in 2019 December. In this study, twelve children who were 11-year-old then, wrote their commentaries about children’s rights and the requirements to have the rights. Thus, in the final part of this paper, the rights will be addressed through children’s perspectives.