‘I am not a Christian’, the younger daughter declared at the dinner table. Forks and knives were put down; eyes swivelled expectantly. She continued, ‘to be a Christian, you have to believe in Christ, and I don’t.’ Her atheist father smothered a smile while I sat, mind racing, wondering what my God-fearing Christian mother would say. She was already horrified that we sent our children to birthday parties dressed in leggings and T-shirts, and not gussied up in ‘proper’ party frocks. Now this. Had we over-Eekelaared the children? Can one over-Eekelaar, though? I didn’t think so. My firmly held belief has always been that we should seek to put his theories into practice in ‘real life’. We had been trying to live by Eekelaar’s principle of dynamic self-determinism, which, he explains, places a duty on the carer:

We had not closed her offfrom other influences and, indeed, had a Diwali lamp atop the fireplace next to the dining room table. She was au fait with Ramadan and Eid(s), Hannukah and the finer points of Christmas (presents) and Easter (chocolate eggs and bunnies). There may have been some Halloween thrown in there too, but that I blame on a sabbatical spent in New York. No, the children were not over-Eekelaared, though, if truth be told, there have been times when I have thought them overly enamoured of their ‘right to be heard’. One cannot blame Eekelaar for that though. Well, on reflection, maybe one can. Even before the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, in 1989, he was one of the early proponents of educating children about their rights, a project now best exemplified by the UNICEF Rights Respecting Programme in Schools.