Children

Who owns children? One of your philosophers wrote that Locke said a father has too much control over his children. I feel that the federal government has too much control over what a father can or cannot do to his children.

Comments

Perhaps we could start with a related question: who owns you? The answer, I'd think, is "No one." You aren't property. You may have obligations and responsibilities to others, but part of the way we think about persons is that they aren't property and shouldn't be treated as such. That suggests that children aren't property either. They have more limited rights and responsibilities than adults do, but they don't belong to anyone in the way that, say, a painting might belong to me.

Suppose I own a valuable painting by some important artist -- Cezanne, for the sake of an example. Then though it would be a wasteful and bizarre thing for me to do, I am entitled to do most anything with that Cezanne -- including burning it or using it as a tablecloth. That goes with it's being property. But suppose I have a child. The word "have" here doesn't mean "own." For present purposes, it might best be thought of as meaning "am responsible for," and not just biologically. The child is entitled to be cared for, and to have its interests looked out for. The fact that I am the biological parent doesn't entitle me, for example, to turn the child into my slave. And the fact that the child isn't yet old enough to take care of itself doesn't change that. But since I am not entitled to make the child my slave, and since it would be so clearly harmful to the child to do that, it's hard to see the objection to the government intervening if I try. To repeat the basic point, the child is not my property; I don't own the child.

So we can sum up what we've said so far this way: perhaps (though it's a whole different topic) the government interferes too much when it comes to what people do with what they own -- with their property. But even if that's true, it doesn't get us far on the matter of governments interfering with what parents do to their children.

That said, this doesn't end the matter. Most of us think parents should have a lot of liberty in deciding how to raise their children. This isn't because parents own the children, but because many decisions about how to raise children go back to differences in values that we think a democracy ought to respect. If I want my children to attend a religious school, for example, then (so long as the school isn't abusive) most of us think the government should allow that.

There's room to argue about what the limits should be. Most of us probably think that unless the parent is doing clear harm to the child, the government should keep its distance. But however we sort through the cases, being clear on the idea that no one owns children is a good place to start.

Read another response by Allen Stairs

Read another response about Children