Parenting is a conflict of interest

On parental rights, ownership, youth liberation, mothering and care work.

Jan 27, 2024

Hello hello!!

Apologies for the lateness of what is usually a Friday post.. this week has been a lot and I didn’t get to it yesterday (also, it’s long, it may not fit in your inbox in its entirety!)

First off, THANK YOU to those who came to the first ever Community Call, I really enjoyed the conversation and am looking forward to more soon.

For those new to my Friday posts, I usually share something that got me fired up and radicalized, what I’m reading and listening to, what my kids have been into this week, and a few other shares from across the world of self-directed education and beyond.

These are usually for my paid members, but I’m only partially paywalling this post because I feel like the topic I wrote about below is important and needs to be accessible.

WHAT IS RADICALIZING ME

This week, I came across this line in an essay by Kathleen Nicole O’Neal (whom I’m fairly new to):

“When discussing youth liberation, parenting is not a qualification. It is a conflict of interest.”

She is referring to the way parents use parenthood as a justification, a reason and a qualifying status for being able to advocate for youth. We, the parents, are the best advocates for children and young people because we are parents, and more specifically, we are OUR children’s parents.

She goes on to say that actually, people who are not parents may sometimes be in a better position to advocate for youth because they are not parents. She writes, “It’s important that no-one ever trick us into thinking of the position of a parent as necessarily pro-youth or even neutral,” and explains how parents’ position of power over their children essentially means they have an interest in “advocating for their continued oppression.”

Whoa.

This last paragraph of her short essay left me with ALL the feelings. (You can find the full essay here).

I have often written that I don’t believe we, the parents, know best, and that I have always claimed that actually my children know themselves best. I push back when parents repeat the truism that “I know my child best,” because while we may know our child very well, I actually don’t think we ever know them better than they know themselves.

On top of that, I worry about the way parental rights are wielded in many societies and cultures, and I think it is fair to say that very often, they are in opposition to children’s rights. (The parents rights movement in the US is most probably the reason the US has not signed the UNCRC.)

But let me back up a teeny bit, and define youth liberation for those of you who perhaps are new to this phrase, and also for myself because I love definitions!

Go ahead and skip the bit in Italics if you are already aware of what it is.

While young people standing up for their own freedom has been a theme throughout the whole of history, the modern youth liberation movement started gaining traction in the 1970s. As far as I can tell, it is not a cohesive movement and there are many flavors of child and youth liberation, all around the world. So perhaps there is no single definition of what youth liberation is.
This is a pretty good piece that summarizes some of the themes of this movement.
How is children’s rights and youth rights different to child and youth liberation?
Eloise Rickman
explains in her post about this topic, that “Children’s liberation requires deep structural change, which in turn calls for critical engagement with the power imbalance between adults and children, and — crucially — demands that children have a seat at the table and are involved with decision-making processes which affect their lives.”
The rights frameworks we have are useful, but they are not enough. Youth and child liberation goes further in advocating for young people as people, in analyzing the way young people are structurally discriminated against and oppressed, and in connecting their struggle to the struggle of all other marginalized groups. Youth liberation, like all liberation movements, is and should be led by young people.

Ok, back to the main point. I was saying that I agree that parental rights, a strong theme in many circles including some home education and homeschool spaces, can absolutely be in opposition to youth liberation.

On the one hand, we have this idea that as parents, we have a right to decide how our child is looked after, raised, and educated. The ideas of parental rights and educational choice go hand in hand, especially in the US, and quoting parental rights is not only at the centre of our current culture wars, but is also the reason many of us are even able to homeschool.

We owe an extremely uncomfortable debt to organizations that advocate for the rights of parents to make decisions for their children, and I’ve written a bit more about it in this post about homeschool regulation.

We cannot escape that the fundamental assumption behind parental rights is that children are the property of their parents.

This idea has a very very long history.

For centuries, parents in many Western societies and beyond, essentially treated their children like another asset, a piece of property to be sold, loaned, given and used for labour.

The legacy of the still very popular refrain “because I said so” is long, and still very much with us. It relies on the idea that children are ours. It is embedded in our language and the way we in fact refer to children as OUR children. Teresa Graham Brett questions this assumption and many others in her excellent book.

This ownership model is deeply patriarchal, colonialist and capitalist - it relies on our societal assumptions that we can in fact own land, property, and even small humans, and that we have rights as owners of this private property.

This is not the case in all cultures - not all cultures see ownership in this way, or even have concepts of ownership and private property. This is very much an issue in cultures that elevate power over dynamics and the rule of "might is right.”

In his book A Minor Revolution, Adam Benforado writes, “We could easily speak and think about our children differently: not as our things, not in relation to ourselves, but as entities with their own standing in the world. And, if we did, our interactions with our children would suddenly seem very strange.”

This is not a new idea, of course, except that in some unschooling circles, parental rights have become tangled up with this idea that we as parents need to stand up for our rights, in order for our children to be free.

Benforado writes that much of what we believed we had a right to determine (what our children eat, wear, watch; who our children socialize with; what they’re exposed to; where they choose to go; how they choose to learn), is actually THEIRS to decide upon. He argues this should be the case from a legal perspective, and should be reflected in government policies and legislation.

Once we begin to shift out relationship of power over, to a more equitable one, our parental rights start to whither away - they have no foothold anymore because they always relied on our ability to use force, coercion, threats and punishments to uphold them.

While we may have believed our rights were benefiting our children (and in some cases perhaps they were), the very foundation they sit on is our ability as parents to make decisions FOR our children - regardless of what other adults, the government, or our children think.

Parental rights essentially assume that parents always, inevitably, have their children’s ACTUAL best interests at heart. And even in these cases, it can be problematic because why not simply defer to the rights of children instead? If our actions as parents are founded on doing what is best for our child, surely what is best of our child is more accurately reflected by a framework of children’s rights, or by the ideas of child and youth liberation groups that centre young people’s voices?

This is even more important because we have seen again and again, that parents often do not have children’s best interests at heart - we see this in the way we parent, in the mistreatment of children by parents, in the brainwashing, neglect, coercion, and general disregard for children as people that is displayed by parents again and again.

Benforado’s book is full of examples where parents have used their rights as parents to infringe upon their children’s humanity, rights to ownership over their own bodies and minds, their autonomy and wholeness, and often their children’s rights to their physical safety and even their life. He looks at examples of parents refusing medical treatment for their children on religious grounds, resulting in extreme harm and even death, and says, “what, in other circumstance, would be deemed a homicide is accepted as sound parenting.” These examples may seem extreme, but they happen. We need to take note.

Do parental rights have ANY place at all in youth liberation? What about our right to remove our children from the school system?

This is tricky and I won’t be able to do this topic justice. But I will say that if we had legislation in place that upheld the rights of our young people to choose how to be educated, then we wouldn’t need parental rights for this purpose. Perhaps the issue is not that parental rights are needed, but that they are preventing many of our societies from elevating the rights of young people to a more prominent place, from listening to young people’s voices, and from encouraging adults to be partners, not bosses.

I want to believe that we can partner with our children AND be responsible for their safety and protection, without calling upon our right to ownership over them.

But to go back to the quote - I think what I found confronting was this idea that actually, being a parent is a conflict of interest. And while there is something there - parenting is so intensely personal, and sometimes even the most well-meaning parent succumbs to their desire for their child to be a certain way, or do a certain thing, to the detriment of that child’s actual humanity - I’m not sure that parents exclusively are the issue.

The issue, is adults. Being an adult is a conflict of interest.

Adults have often thought they are qualified to make decisions for children because we assume know best, and we know we have the power to enforce our devisions. We don’t stop to consider that actually, we often operate from self-interest and make decisions for children that are NOT in children’s best interests at all.

To Kathleen Nicole O’Neal’s point, we often don’t stop and deconstruct our own biases when making decisions that concern children, and this is especially clear in government policies and legislation.

We saw this in the establishment of public schooling as a means to essentially shape and control future citizens, for example, and we see this in the decisions adults make that do not prioritize children: I have talked more about this here, here, here, and here, so I won’t repeat myself.

I agree with the statement that parenting is not a qualifying factor in making decisions for children, and that as parents we should absolutely question the role of parental rights, and the way our rights are often in direct opposition to the liberation of children.

There can be no liberation within a construct that is rooted in ownership. I don’t believe there is any place for parental rights in youth liberation, but I do think there is an important role for parents, and that parenting outside of a framework of ownership, is not necessarily a conflict of interest.

I think there are two things that are crucial:

Yes, parents have specific challenges and conflicts of interest with relation to their children, AND parents have a really important role in partnering with their children, outside of a framework of parental rights. We have enormous power in our home, and that comes with enormous responsibility and a need for accountability towards our children. Our role IS unique. Yes, it can also be a conflict of interest, but equally it gives us access to our children in ways that other adults don’t generally have: we care for them and build close relationships to them, many of us love our children more than we love anyone else and would sacrifice our lives for them; they rely on us for most of their needs, we provide attachment and co-regulation, and we have the opportunity to really get to know them, support them, guide them, and share our lives with them as partners. In all of these ways, we are on our children’s sides, not in conflict with them.
The larger source of oppression are not parents, but adults. Adultism is pervasive among most adult humans, whether they are parents or not. Structural oppression of young people is seen in most places, whether parents are involved or not. And while being a parent doesn’t automatically make you more qualified to advocate for youth, being an adult does make us less qualified.

Perhaps as a parent I am biased (I definitely am!), but I don’t think that diminishing the role us parents play in partnering with our children is helpful in furthering child liberation. Most of us love our children deeply and want the best for them. And while our role as parents can sometimes cause deep harm, we also hold the potential to support our children’s freedom, autonomy and liberation.

We care about this more than an adult picked at random from the population. Many of us gladly give up our entire lives to practice this, write about it, facilitate it, advocate for it. If it weren’t for the parents (can we shout out the mothers and primary carers? Because often, it is us, quietly doing this work) then perhaps youth liberation would not be talked about as much as it is.

Being a parent DOES qualify me to care for and support my child, and to elevate the voices of other young people. And it can also, absolutely, be a conflict of interest. My parenthood and adulthood can absolutely get in the way. We need youth voices to lead the way, even though there are inherent difficulties with this too (which I’ve written about here.)

I also think that minimising the work carers of children do, ends up devaluing that work. Adults who care for children, whether they are parents or not, deserve to be seen, valued, and made visible in more ways than we are currently doing.

This is not about parental rights - it is simply about elevating domestic and care work. Elevating mothering matters. When I use the word mothering, I mean the act of caring for humans and communities, which, unlike motherhood (a patriarchal institution), is, according to Angela Garbes, an act of social change that is “not defined by gender”, but rather by the labour of caring, loving, looking after someone else.

Lastly, Benforado makes an important point: raising children should be a community effort. Historically, it has been in many cultures.

We should not have to do it alone. The fact that we do is a double-edged sword: it gives us extreme power over our children, AND puts an enormous amount of pressure and responsibility on our shoulders, while also absolving all other people, institutions and structures from the responsibility of our children’s welfare.

Benforado notes, “it tells us that the suffering of other people’s children - in front of us, that we could do something about - is not our problem.. This is not who were made to be. We evolved to be cooperative breeders. We could not have come this far separate and apart.”

We should not have to take this on alone.

And while I object to statements such as “Our children are all of our children,” because this too, reinforces a sense that children are property, I do believe that children are our collective responsibility, while also belonging firmly to themselves.

Their struggle for liberation is their own, AND we can support, protect and guide them.

I’ll leave you with an extract from this poem by Khalil Gibran, which is possibly over-used but I also love it so much:

Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
     For they have their own thoughts.
     You may house their bodies but not their souls,
     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
     You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

WHAT I’M READING

I’m half way through Neuroqueer Heresies (thank you

Marnina Kammersell

!) and really enjoying it. It’s an excellent read if you want to get really clear about what the Neurodiversity paradigm is, and what all the various terms associated with it mean. It’s also a quick read!

This is an interesting piece about how state schools are not the equalizer we think they are, and how one council the UK is hoping to change that.

I shared this piece about experts by

Anna Hewitt

in Notes, but I’ll share again here because it’s well worth reading.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO

I got super into this podcast on the Abercrombie Guys - I’ll say no more. It’s horrifying and not surprising in all the ways (also heads’ up it’s explicit content!).

This podcast by Jon Ronson is also really good! He looks at the historical roots of our current culture wars in the US, and is attempting to be neutral, whatever that even means (I have thoughts about this, obv), but nevertheless it’s interesting. This episode is about how the pro-life movement started and this one is about the how the roots of our current school textbook wars.

WHAT MY KIDS ARE INTO

We had some super cool discussion about the human body this week, kind of out of the blue, as often happens. We keep going back to DK Human body which is so good. I also looked up a more detailed graphic of the brain because we had questions. I found a good graphic and resources on the Twinkl website and this video of Dan Siegel (author of The Whole Brain Child) explaining the hand model of the brain.

All of us are leaning into math puzzles right now. P and I are loving the book Math Riddles for Smart Kids, L and I are working through Beast Academy Puzzle Book 2 (we decided the BA curriculum is just heavy and frankly, unnecessary right now. He has a real passion for numbers at the moment and the last thing I want to do it smother it by turning it into work!) Some games we play regularly are Check the fridge and Adsumudi. We are all about games so if you have any recommendations, pop them in comments please!