How can babies and non-verbal children communicate their rights through arts and participation?

NICCY welcomed Rhona Matheson, associate and former CEO of Starcatchers, to our headquarters last week to hear about her research and over 20 years’ experience working with babies and non-verbal children to develop their communication skills through arts practices. Particularly focusing on how they can understand the depth and breadth of their rights at a very young age.

In this blog, Commissioner Chris Quinn shares how babies and non‑verbal children are still too often overlooked in participation and in children’s rights practice, and praises the work of Rhona Matheson and Starcatchers in helping to change this.

Through The Voice of the Baby: A Reflective Guide for the Arts, Rhona and colleagues have developed a rights‑based methodology that recognises babies as active communicators from birth. Voice is understood not as speech, but as expressed through gaze, movement, emotion, engagement and relationship, placing responsibility on adults to listen, interpret and respond ethically in line with Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

This approach strongly aligns with the Scottish Government’s Voice of the Infant Best Practice Guidelines and Infant Pledge (something that we need to emulate in NI) which affirm that babies have feelings, views and rights, and that professionals must create the space, interpret the voice, deliver messages to the right audience and ensure these have the influence required for babies’ views to be noticed and acted upon.

Together, these developments extend the Lundy Model of Participation (a widely used framework for implementing Article 12 UNCRC) by demonstrating how its core principles can be meaningfully applied to babies and non‑verbal children, whose communication may be embodied, relational, or sensory rather than verbal.

At NICCY, we are inspired by this growing body of work to challenge our own participation practice and ensure we include babies’ and non-verbal children’s views in our work.

All babies, children, and young people are rights holders, including participation from the earliest age. We are keen to connect with early years and SEN practitioners to explore how these principles can be embedded across NICCY’s work to better realise the rights of babies and non‑verbal children, whose voices may otherwise go unheard.