Children's Hope, Resilience and Autonomy

ABSTRACT

Hope has been neglected as a topic by philosophers interested in families, children, and children's autonomy. Hope may be confused with adjacent phenomena, such as optimism and wishful thinking. However, hope, when understood to involve goals, exploration of pathways to achieving those goals, and motivation to explore the pathways, is necessary for autonomy. It is also importantly related to children's resilience in response to challenges and stressors. In the course of explaining what I take autonomy to involve, why I think children can have areas of local autonomy, and connections between hope, autonomy and resilience, I examine evidence that supports my claims about these connections. I then conclude with a brief discussion of implications of these connections for social policy, especially in the educational context, and for personal interactions with children.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• autonomy
• hope
• resilience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Amy Mullin has ongoing philosophical interests in family ethics, aesthetics, and social philosophy. She is the author of Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare: Ethics, Experience and Reproductive Labour, along with journal articles and book chapters about children, families, art, morality and the imagination.

Notes

1. As Oshana (2016) argues, many episodes of local autonomy are no guarantee to global autonomy, as the latter requires a person's power to control all the choices and actions that are significant to the direction of her life (2–3). I believe that few of us have global autonomy, and that fortunately it is not required for us to have local autonomy in particular domains of our life, and at particular times. We need not have a plan for our lives, nor freedom from influence of others, in order to act at times in ways that are self-directed in the service of personally important goals, values, or commitments.