Are children people?

Liberalism doesn't know what to do with kids.

Somebody call CPS. (Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Very few people believe that children have the same moral rights as adults. But for liberals, this is a bit weird, because our entire political philosophy is based on the fundamental social and political equality of every person. Yet, we seem weirdly blasé about the unequal status of children and the authoritarian set-up of childhood.

If people have inalienable rights then why don’t they have them from birth?

I’m 30 and closer to being a parent than to being a child, but I have spent the majority of my life as a second-class citizen on account of my age. Unsurprisingly, I keenly remember how restrictive life could feel as a minor. Put aside the usual gripes about the drinking age being set at 21, this is about something more fundamental: to be a child is to have barely more rights than a prized pet.

Children do not have the right to dress themselves how they like, speak how they like, or even share opinions that differ from their parents. By this I mean, parents are free to inflict a range of punishments to enforce obedience. Parents can hit their children, they can confine them to their room, cut off their access to the outside world, and remove every shred of privacy, including their bedroom doors, if they desire.

Even the most fundamental right the United States was founded on, freedom of religion, does not extend to children. Your parents can make you go to church, wear religious clothing, practice specific rituals, and (with only very few limits) adhere to rules that can prevent you from accessing medical care like vaccines, blood transfusions, or abortions.

I don’t say all this because I think parents are evil or to call for total child liberation. The vast majority of parents, even ones that make pretty large errors, are more like benevolent dictators. I fully expect that as a parent, I will run a benevolent dictatorship of my own. I plan to require my kids to come to church with me, to dress a certain way, and to speak respectfully to everyone; I expect I will employ punishments in order to impose my will.

But I’m struggling to reconcile what seems obvious to me as a would-be parent with how discordant this feels with my political views. A golden cage is still a cage.

There is no perfect solution to the problem of children but we can improve their lot. Children’s dependency is the core justification for parental authority. The more dependent we make children on their parents, the more authoritarian childhood becomes. And modernity has increased childhood dependency. Even the basic freedom to play in public unsupervised for a few hours is being stripped away, but so too are the bigger freedoms, to work, to walk or take the bus on one’s own. These secret hours away from the probing eyes of guardians have slowly disappeared.

Of course, all of this harms parents too. But let’s stick with the kids for a moment.

This isn’t just about my internal turmoil over the nature and extent of parental authority—some of the most vicious political debates are about the problem of children. Class and racial segregation largely have to do with parents wanting to control their children’s peer group. Other issues like trans kids in sports and how history and politics are taught in public schools play a surprisingly large role in our politics relative to their material impacts.

The Argument ran a poll earlier this month probing voters’ views on various parenting questions and there was a cross-class, cross-racial consensus in favor of strong parental rights. We asked whether students should be allowed to “use the restrooms for the gender they identify with, even when that differs from the gender they were assigned at birth” and 62% of respondents said they were opposed.

We also wanted to know how support for government intervention in parenting decisions polled outside of the context of hot button issues like the rights of trans kids. So, we asked voters to pick between two statements:

1. “Parents should have broad rights to raise their children however they see fit, even if others strongly disagree with their decisions.”

2. “Government and schools should step in when they believe parents’ decisions are harmful.”

Fifty-four percent chose broad parental rights and just 33% chose government intervention.

We also asked respondents whether “it is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking.” Forty-nine percent said they strongly or somewhat agreed and 46% said they somewhat or strongly disagreed. Other polls with the exact same wording have found even higher levels of support.

Little brutes