The children exception is the argument that the belief you must earn your place is not really held, because we already carry children who have earned nothing. It contains a real insight and a tempting overstatement, and the difference matters.
The insight: a child produces almost nothing, consumes enormous resources for years, cannot repay what is given, and has no idea what they will become — and almost no one demands that the child justify the resources first. Something in how we treat children does reach toward unconditional standing.
The overstatement: that this proves we already grant standing unconditionally and merely keep the circle small. Look closely and much of the way children are carried is deferred standing rather than unconditional standing — carried now because they are expected to become something later — and the productivity ontology is installed in childhood, not at adulthood (don’t waste your potential; we sacrificed for you). The accurate reading is smaller: society occasionally approaches unconditional standing through intimate attachment, yet even there it is often contaminated by expectations of future value, reciprocity, identity, or legacy. The test is whether standing survives the disappearance of expected return; where it does not, the standing was conditional all along. That makes the framework’s demand more radical, not less — it asks institutions to hold participants the way love only intermittently manages to. See the fear of being nobody.