CHILDREN ARE, in Law, a man's issue begotten on his wife. As to illegitimate children, see BASTARD.
For the legal duties of parents to their children, see the articles PARENT and BASTARD.
As to the duties of children to their parents, they arise from a principle of natural justice and retribution. For to those who gave us existence, we naturally owe subjection and obedience during our minority, and honour and reverence ever after; they who protected the weakness of our infancy, are entitled to our protection in the infirmity of their age; they who by sustenance and education have enabled their offspring to prosper, ought, in return, to be supported by that offspring, in case they stand in need of assistance. Upon this principle proceed all the duties of children to their parents, which are enjoined by positive laws. And the Athenian laws carried this principle into practice with a scrupulous kind of nicety, obliging all children to provide for their father when fallen into poverty; with an exception to spurious children, to those whose chastity had been prostituted with consent of their father, and to those whom he had not put in any way of gaining a livelihood. The legislature, says Baron Montesquieu, considered, that, in the first case, the father, being uncertain, had rendered the natural obligation precarious; that, in the second case, he had sullied the life he had given, and done his children the greatest of injuries, in depriving them of their reputation; and that, in the third case, he had rendered their life (so far as in him lay) an insupportable burden, by furnishing them with no means of subsistence.
Our laws agree with those of Athens, with regard to the first only of these particulars, the case of spurious issue. In the other cases, the law does not hold the tie of nature to be dissolved by any misbehaviour of the parent; and, therefore, a child is equally justifiable in defending the person, or maintaining the cause or suit, of a bad parent as of a good one; and is equally compellable, if of sufficient ability, to maintain and provide for a wicked and unnatural progenitor, as for one who has shown the greatest tenderness and parental piety. See further the article FILIAL AFFECTION.