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Are feminist goals and children’s rights necessarily at odds? Diverse fields of academic practice have tended to respond in the affirmative. Scholarship ranging from the gender and development literature to feminist scholarship on carework and reproductive labour emphasises the tension between women and children embedded in social policy design, in which children represent a burden of care for their mothers. 2 As feminists have noted, historical child welfare practices, and more recently the rhetoric of the ‘best interests of the child’, have often undermined the interests of women. 3 The children’s rights literature has paid little attention to women’s interests; it renders them invisible or, worse, actively obfuscates them by treating women only as mothers. 4 Feminists have noted how certain children’s rights approaches emphasise the practical contradiction between children’s care and women’s autonomy and how …