A Socioecological Model of Children’s Rights

This chapter uses the socioecological model elaborated by Urie Brofenbrenner as a conceptual framework for analyzing children’s rights law. Constructed of five concentric circles surrounding children—the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem—the socioecological model captures the interconnections between different environments while addressing the developmental nature of childhood and thus the constant change in the individual characteristics and needs of children. The chapter makes three propositions: (1) The needs-rights of children appear in a range of interconnected domains in children’s lives that can be organized according to Brofenbrenner’s model; (2) children’s rights laws can, and often do, regulate children’s lives across these different domains and thus can, and at times do, address the full range of children’s needs-rights; (3) because the various domains in children’s lives are interconnected, the enforcement of children’s rights laws must be targeted at the full range of the domains of the human ecosystem of children.