Children: dehumanized or not yet fully human?

Is perceiving children as not yet fully human a manifestation of dehumanization or a mere reflection that children lack the features commonly considered distinctly human? In this paper, I discuss how seeing children as human becomings or human beings ties in with different perspectives on ‘what it is to be human’, drawn from the natural sciences, philosophy, and social sciences. In so doing, I highlight the benefits of endorsing an existentialist position where the existence of a human being predates their essence, which is created by their actions in the world. Both children and adults are human beings and human becomings . Moreover, I propose that these perspectives have implications for the dehumanization of other social categories.


Introduction
"Being human is about becoming. Sometimes we need to pause and ponder, but mostly it is our action or lack of it that determines who we are and how we become." -Emmy van Deurzen, Emmy's epigrams Some years ago, my team launched a research program to empirically test whether children are regarded as less human than adults -that is, whether children are dehumanized. The idea was quite simple: Our mental representation of a prototypical human being is an adult person (e.g. [1]). Children, by definition, are not yet adults. Might this imply that we think of children as not yet fully human?
The literature hints that this might be so. For example, Black people, Native Americans, and indigenous people of South America were likened to nonhuman animals and children by White people, in the past and now [2,3]. Adults perceive infants' mental capacities to be more similar to dogs' or chimpanzees' than to their own [4]. Childlike is a marker of animalistic dehumanization when applied to social categories or individuals [5] and perceived higher competence, agency, and civility predict lower dehumanization [6][7][8]. Thus, empirically testing whether children are dehumanized seemed worthwhile.
Moreover, our findings could be relevant for practitioners who work daily with children in several fields (e.g. education, health, and social work [9][10][11]). Dehumanization is frequently linked with disrespectful treatment (e.g. [12]). If children are dehumanized, people looking after or working with children should be acutely aware of this to prevent disrespect to children's dignity.
For social psychological literature, our findings could contribute to current debates about the conceptualization of dehumanization [13] and about whether it adds explanatory power to mere intergroup preference [14][15][16]. If children belonging to otherwise same social categories as adults are dehumanized, this would point to a dissociation between dehumanization and intergroup preference, as children generally are a well-liked social category to which adults do not belong (e.g. [17]). This empirical dissociation was theoretically predicted since the emergence of social psychological studies on dehumanization but rarely empirically found [18].
Our research program adapted paradigms that have been used to detect subtle or blatant dehumanization toward other social categories [19,20]. The results are not published yet, and one of the reasons why the manuscript has been rejected for publication surprised me. This reason centers on the notion that children are biologically human, but not yet fully human in other meanings of the word. The research was deemed flawed, because it mixed up different meanings of the word 'human', and uninteresting, because allegedly participants did not dehumanize children, they simply conveyed: "Children are not yet fully human".
As a psychologist, used to thinking about each individual, including children, as a whole person in their own right, this response to the manuscript surprised me and triggered my curiosity to better understand different perspectives on what it is to be (deemed) human. In this paper, I will focus on two different perspectives on the question "What is it to be human?", integrating literature from biology, philosophy, psychology, and children's studies. One perspective is consistent with the notion that children are human becomings [21] and the other with the notion that children are human beings. Toward the end, I will propose that both perspectives have relevant implications to other social categories, beyond children, and will propose a reconciliation of both perspectives.

What is it to be human?
The word 'human' has more than one possible meaning. Usually, people assume the biological meaning of the word is the most objective or consensual. From a taxonomic perspective, human is the common name for a member of the Homo sapiens species, just like wolf is the common name for a member of the Canis lupus species. However, asserting that being human is to belong to the H. sapiens species is true by necessity (i.e. tautological). Thus, one usually turns to what distinguishes humans from other animals.
Isolating distinctive human attributes has proven difficult, even in biology or paleoanthropology. The once believed (in Western societies, at least) big gap between humans and their closest nonhuman relatives, particularly in terms of cognitive abilities, has been shrinking (e.g. [22]). From an evolutionary perspective, distinctive human attributes depend on whether one is encompassing contemporary humans, behaviorally modern humans, or anatomically modern humans of the H. sapiens species, for example [23]. This is revealing of the complexity of the matter. Interestingly, whereas children undoubtedly are taxonomically human, they take time to master abilities (such as speech, abstract reasoning, or bipedalism) seen as distinctly human [Encyclopaedia Britannica; URL: https://www. britannica.com/topic/human-being].
Still, the word 'human' has other meanings. Below, I outline two different perspectives that emphasize different aspects of what it is to be human, with different implications for how we perceive children. Each perspective emerges from a coherent set of beliefs, arguments, and evidence. Inspired by Qvortrup's phrasing [21], the perspectives are dubbed children as human becomings and children as human beings.

Children as human becomings
From one perspective, socialization or enculturation is what makes us human. When we are born, we are part of the animal family. We do what other animals do. We eat, we sleep, we are alive. But we are not human yet, in the sense that we have not yet learned the particular ways of the humans. From this perspective, 'feral children' are a vivid illustration that human children are not born fully human [24]. The development of full human features and abilities needs interaction with other human beings (e.g. [25]).
This perspective can be brought together with a longestablished view of natural categories (i.e. species) as possessing a particular essence. In Western philosophy, Aristotle was the first to thoroughly discuss 'the what it is to be' of something, which was later translated to 'essence' [26]. Aristotle proposed that this essence was tightly related to the mature form of the individual, because the immature being (e.g. acorn) has the potential to become an exemplar of the category (i.e. oak tree), but only the mature form actually is an exemplar of the category. In this sense, children are potentially human, not human yet.
The gradation inherent to the human becomings perspective is also consistent with the natural way people process information about categories. Cognitive psychology literature reveals that categories are not as clear-cut as people assume (e.g. [27]). For one thing, category members differ in how typical they are of a given category. An apple is a more typical member of the category 'fruits' than an olive. So, intuitively people think of apples as fruitier than olives [28]. Moreover, necessary or sufficient features of categories -essential features without which is impossible to belong to a categoryare much harder to identify than contingent properties [29]. For example, 'blade' or 'cuts' may be thought of as essential properties of knives. But other objects have blades and aren't knives (e.g. swords), and some knives don't cut and are still knives (e.g. ornamental knives). Children lack, or have incipient forms of, features and abilities that people strongly associate with the category 'humans'. As such, one may feel that children are less human than adults, although knowing that children are members of the human category. However, whereas ornamental knives will not take offense if denied full 'knife-ness', human beings may rightly do so if denied full humanness [30,31].
Sociologists and scholars from various disciplines, mainly from a children's studies approach, have been exposing the injustice of viewing children according to the adults they will become [32,33] or childhood as a preparatory phase for 'life' [34][35][36]. Social psychologists, however, have rarely studied how children are perceived by adults. People tend to believe that many categories have essences (i.e. psychological essentialism) and extend this belief to social categories (e.g. [37]). If adults believe there is an underlying reality that explains why children behave the way they do and makes children, as a social category, fundamentally distinct from adults, this may put children at risk of being essentialized in a way that distances them from a supposed human essence, linked with mature human beings (e.g. [5,38]).
Research on psychological essentialism reveals that social categories are essentialized when seen as natural kinds or coherent entities [39,40]. Because essentialized categories are believed to possess deep and unchanging properties (unaffected by superficial changes), one might assume that age categories are not essentialized: Age changes with time. However, age categories are transient only from a lifespan or longitudinal perspective (adults were once children). From a societal or cross-sectional perspective, age categories are stable (there are always adults and children; members cannot change membership at their own will). Moreover, broad age categories, namely 'young people' and 'old people', are perceived as natural kinds [39]. Plausibly, the category 'children' is perceived more so, particularly considering that age is related to biological maturation. Children biologically differ from adults, and biological components strongly contribute to psychological essentialism, as they are perceived as internal and deep-seated (e.g. [41]).
However, this literature focuses on people's tendency to ascribe different essences to human subcategories, rather than on ascription of human essence to those subcategories. The latter has been explored in psychological dehumanization literature [42]. If the category 'children' is psychologically essentialized, adults probably ascribe more human essence to adults (ingroup) in contrast to children (outgroup) of otherwise same social categories. Dehumanization is believed to be rooted in ethnocentric beliefs about human essence [38]. The current paper highlights these beliefs may be adultcentric too.

Children as human beings
The other perspective suggests accepting that there is no such thing as a given human essence. This is not a new idea. Existentialist philosophers have been proposing it for quite a while, and existentialist psychotherapists have been succeeding at applying it to mental health [43]. Sartre [44] famously put it as 'existence precedes essence'. Artifacts have essences that precede their existence. For example, the essence of knives must be known by knifemakers who then bring knives into existence. Humans, however, are living beings, not artifacts. Human existence precedes essence because existence is a given: Humans are 'thrown' into the world with a body and an ability to relate with that world. In contrast, essence is constructed: Humans realize themselves in the world through their actions, in interaction with the world, not as consequence of an internal, fixed nature [43]. Sartre adds that "although it is impossible to find in each and every man a universal essence that can be called human nature, there is nevertheless a human universality of condition" [44]. This universality of human condition, including being born human, moving from birth to death, being-in-the-world, enables us to understand other people [43], even when they are very different from usfor example, children.
In other words, believing that there is a human essence, or that social categories have essences, is a mistake. Children exist as humans in the world, just like everyone else. Each human, including children, creates their own essence through their actions and choices. This essence is not teleological, it is open-ended. We change our essence by changing our actions or choices. Neither our genes nor environment pre-determine our essence, although both probabilistically and reciprocally predispose us to particular actions or choices (e.g. [45]). We are living organisms, specifically animals. So, throughout our lives, we do what other animals do. We eat, we sleep, we are alive. We are fully animal, fully human, and always learning. Socialization and enculturation are part of our human condition and indispensable for our living. But they are not what makes us human.
The children as human beings perspective is consistent with the cornerstone of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights", preconized in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, too. The very need for a Convention on the Rights of the Child suggests that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was not enough to protect children's inherent dignity as human beings, which may be linked to a pervasive dehumanization of children.

What about adults?
Other social categories may be affected by the notion that one is not born fully human and must learn from others to become so. The human becomings perspective places a strong emphasis on cultural knowledge and on complex, usually intellectual, abilities supposedly unique to humans. Schooling is an obvious way to pass a lot of that knowledge and abilities to younger generations. However, this emphasis puts several social categories at risk of being dehumanized. Social categories who routinely face social exclusion or lower academic achievement, such as Roma people in Europe, persons with learning disabilities, or people living in poverty, may be seen as not having become fully human, even as adults. Other social categories may suffer when one defines what it is to be human in relation to abilities, paving the way for the dehumanization of older adults, people with disabilities, mental disorders, and so on [46][47][48].
All aforementioned social categories are infantilized to this day. Being blatantly compared with children or subtly treated in condescending ways is yet another risk of the human becomings perspective. However, whereas children will (presumably) eventually develop features that are seen as essentially human, members of those other social categories may never acquire them, alienating them even further from what it is believed to be human.
Interestingly, the notion that children are becomings, while adults are beings, does not only imply by contrast that children are not yet human beings, it also implies that adults are not 'becoming' anymore and reached an end-state as humans, as full members of the human category. This is not how most of the adults I know feel about themselves, rather that they are still 'becoming' who they are and will be as humans.

Concluding remarks
When our empirical manuscript was rejected for mistaking dehumanization for a valid belief that children are not fully human in every sense of the word, I saw it as another piece of evidence that children are indeed dehumanized. However, one of the peer-review system's strengths is inviting authors to take diverging opinions seriously. I had mistakenly assumed that social psychologists would agree that perceiving children as not yet fully human was dehumanizing. After reviewing both perspectives, my understanding is that both have something meaningful and true in them. But human becomings implies that some humans are less human than others.
So, how can we foster the notion that children are as human as adults? A solution might be trying to avoid essentialist thought altogether. If essentialism paves the way for prejudice and social injustice [42], it should be avoided. However, developmental psychology literature proposes that the tendency to essentialize categories is a built-in ability of our cognitive system enabling us to learn countless concepts (e.g. wolf and knife) in a relatively short time and to perceive ever-changing individuals as fundamentally the same across time (e.g. [49]). Another solution would be changing the contents ascribed to human essence, so that no human group feels left out. But across history many groups have been, and still are, marginalized.
Thus, changing the way we think about human essence, specifically, might be a better solution [50]. If enough of us do, we can 'sideline bias' [51] by altering the situational landscape that implies that some people are more human than others. Each human first exists. Once living, each human creates their own changeable essence through their interactions with the physical and social world, through the choices they make, which are constrained by complex circumstances but not pre-determined by those circumstances. Knowing about social categories helps us better understand how individuals became who they currently are, but cannot explain why (as in a set of pre-determined reactions) they became who they are, nor predict in a deterministic way who they will become.
The word 'human' has several meanings -not different meanings, as in homonyms, but meanings relating to a central concept, as in polysemy. This central concept is important to us, humans. Denying full humanness to human beings is consequential [13], including for children. A sounder approach is to recognize that all of us, no matter how long we have been living, are human beings. And because living requires perpetual change, all of us are human becomings, too.

Funding
This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Portugal (NT-DL57-4652), the European Association of Social Psychology, The Netherlands (seedcorn grant), and the Research Center for Psychological Science (CICPSI) at the Faculdade de Psicologia da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal.

Declaration of Competing Interest
I have no conflict of interest to disclose.