This chapter suggests there is a tension between adults’ instinctive devotion to children and society’s broader ambivalence about children’s inherent value. While individual parents often sacrifice careers, comfort and even life itself for their offspring, the collective structures of law and medicine reveal persistent adult‑normativity that inevitably subordinates children’s worth to adult preferences. Historical practices of infanticide, the Infanticide Act of 1938, and cases such as Dr Leonard Arthur’s treatment of a newborn with Down’s syndrome illustrate how children’s lives have been evaluated according to parental preferences rather than according to their own intrinsic value. In contemporary disputes over medical care, society continues frequently to privilege notions of parental authority over the child’s interests. The chapter suggests that intuition, though powerful, is an unreliable foundation for ethics, vulnerable to cultural fluctuation and evolutionary contingency. Theological accounts once offered a rational, though unprovable, basis for human value, and their decline has left bioethics searching for secular standards. This chapter advances the need for an age-neutral ethic that rejects adult‑normative assumptions and acknowledges ‘childness’ as a distinctive mode of being. By recognising childness as neither inferior to, nor derivative of, adultness, we can begin to articulate a rationally defensible account of a child’s personal value that withstands shifting cultural intuitions.