Children cannot advocate for themselves. They are typically not experienced in advocacy, do not have the resources and the knowledge to talk to governments, and when they possess that knowledge, society largely ignores them. At least in the United States, children are not taken seriously when they voice complaints.
The US has a variety of child unfriendly laws. As this video mentions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2i4oaRoaG0), many US states allow spanking of kids in schools, and the rates are not low. Physical punishment in the household is also common and legal. While the rates are decreasing, many US kids still face physical punishment. This causes a lot of suffering and worse outcomes at a societal level. The vast majority of people care about children, but this issue has not been brought to the forefront of people’s minds. The United States, in particular, lags behind other countries.
Right now there are many children in the US living in poverty, one of the highest rates of any developed country. There has been a history of advocacy to spend more government money on reducing the poverty rate of children, and it had moderate success. This issue has been talked about by prominent sources, such as Freakonomics (https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-does-the-richest-country-in-the-world-have-so-many-poor-kids/). There have been some attempts to pass bills featuring re-distribution targeting children, such as the Build Back Better act. It has traction inside the federal government. However, it has not yet succeeded.
Because of existing support, I think the issue is extremely tractable. It is not as neglected as other issues, but the fact that children are unable to vote is a big issue. Children are not listened to and don’t have their preferences respected in the US, so other voices need to speak for them. Neglect is the result, as people forget about their childhood and stop caring.
This issue is important. The financial and wellbeing return of good upbringing is well documented. Poverty and physical abuse can be traumatic, and 18 years of relative suffering is a big deal. EA could fund advocacy in this space, and it is likely that reform could easily be pushed over the finishing line. We all know we played the birth lottery. Those of us in rich countries had a much healthier and happier life, on average. But the disparity within some rich countries is still substantial.
I think the lack of adult voices taking children’s issues seriously is a big problem. Children face many problems in the US and other developed countries, and their complaints are largely ignored and glossed over. Countries like the Netherlands where children are taken seriously have some of the happiest children, and I think 18 years of happiness has large moral value. Not being physically abused and not living in poverty seem like very important aspects of living a happy childhood. There are some issues with children that are seeing attention already, such as mental health problems. However, investment in advocacy for children’s happiness and wellbeing seems very neglected.
Thanks Cienna! I'm sure you are far from clueless :)
Like with any large scale policy issue, tractability is a big issue - but in this kind of case I have a couple of vaguely similar examples which show that it could well be tractable. I'm an enormous fan of advocacy and actvism as one of the most cost effective ways to solve specific, clear problems, perhaps even a bigger fan than most effective altruists as I've seen my wife succeed spectacularly a couple of times at least.
My wife worked on something 5 years ago which has some similarity in that it was a policy that was changed, having a big positve effect. Her and a community group from scratch managed to get a local district level law passed to effectively ban alcohol "sachets", tiny 50ml plastic bags of heavy spirits of varying qualities. 2 years later later this was followed up with a nation al ban. This was based on both strong community will to ban the sachets as they could see the enormous harm caused by them, and a large amount of research that shows if you increase the quantity of the minimum size unit of alcohol (e.g. from 50 to 150ml like what happened here) , you hugely lower the damage done by alcohol.
Also the banning of lead paint thing in Malawi has some similarities in that it's a harmful policy being overturned through government advocacy, and that seems to be going pretty well.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ErKzbKWnQMwvzRX4m/seven-things-that-surprised-us-in-our-first-year-working-in
What it would take (for example the high school sleep issue) specifically is advocacy to the ministry of education to pass a local (district wide) or national ordinance decreeing minimum sleep in a high school, then ensuring enforcement (harder than getting the law passed). The physical abuse of primary school children would be much harder as it is culturally ingrained - it's such a well known and horrible issue there are in fact a number of BINGOS (big international NGOs like world vision etc.) doing a terrible job already trying to fix that problem mainly through education (posters, trainings, etc.). High level advocacy would be far better.
The thing is you could throw $30,000 or something at a specific problem such as the borderline torture of sleep deprivation in high school kids and probably have something like a 1 in 10 chance of success(with astronomical uncertainly and probably better odds if it's someone like my wife working on it!) . I'm not going to do the math but it might well be a relatively cost-effective campaign.
Wow I just wrote an essay oh dear...