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11 Int'l J. Child. Rts. 51 (2003-2004)
Negotiating Children's Participation and Autonomy within Families

handle is hein.journals/intjchrb11 and id is 61 raw text is: LA The lnternationalJournalof Children's Rights 11: 51-71, 2003. 51 © 2003 Kluwer Law International. Printed in the Netherlands. Negotiating children's participation and autonomy within families SMILJKA TOMANOVIC Department of Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro Background By introducing children's civil and political rights, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has raised many questions related to restructuring of generational relations within families (Alanen, 2001; Chisholm et al., 1990). The problems are concerned with changing boundaries and power relations between parents and children, which are expressed through the issues of autonomy, control and participation within families. The issues become even more complex when combined with the ideology and process of famil- isation, which, by stressing parents' responsibility, put families into a gap between emancipation and participation (Qvortrup et al., 1994). The concept and the reality of modern family are based, among other things, on participation of its members in family life and on negotiation process. There is an ever-dynamic process emerging between parents' inten- tion to balance care and control and children's struggle for autonomy and recognition. As their parents, children too are developing different individual and group strategies by which they resist adults' pressures and diminish the uneven distribution of power. Related to issues of autonomy and participation, the notion of children's competence seems to be the core issue. The way in which a particular culture defines childhood determines in many aspects the status of children as well as the arenas for their participation in social life. As stated previously, the starting point of my research is the thesis that family constitutes the basic social context for children's participation. In other words, I believe that by participating in family life children realise a substantial part of their participatory rights, while training for participation in civil society (Tomanovi6-Mihajlovi6, 2000). The research starts from a broader concept of participation, which encom- passes identity, autonomy, communication, freedom of choice and decision-

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