A Brief History of Children’s Rights

Child rights and the very concept of childhood are relatively novel ideas in human history, with the first movement toward the protection of this population arising in the late eighteenth century. Progress was made in the United States for child protection primarily through the introduction of child labor laws. International law with the purpose of protecting childhood rights first emerged in 1924 with the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. This was the framework for modern child rights and has been updated and modernized in the past 100 years through the United Nations (UN) Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959, and most recently, the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Currently, the United States is one of only two countries that has not ratified the CRC.