As a Conclusion, to the Future: A Discussion on Trust, Agency and the Semantics of Rights in Intergenerational Relationships

One of the characteristics of modernity of European societies, as much as its global ramifications, is a socio-cultural process commonly known as ‘the discovery of the child’. Since the XVII century, a construct called ‘childhood’, has appeared, gradually but irresistibly, as a structural component of all social systems (Ariés, 1962, Cunningham, 2005). Social systems such as the arts, families, law, health, politics, economics and science have contributed, each one from its specific perspective and language, to the generation of a multidimensional, complex, often contradictory but nevertheless solid semantics of ‘childhood in society’.

Professional practices and discourses have been crossing, clashing, converging and diverging within and across social systems, mixing and overlapping. The result is a panoply of portraits of the same subject, the child, painted with a wide range of ideas and beliefs concerning its capabilities, the value of its agency and the possibility for its self-determination.