Should children’s parents or should the government shape the beliefs and values of children? Natural law theorists argue that parents have a responsibility, and therefore possess the prima facie authority, to direct the upbringing and education of their children. This, according to natural law theory, is no mere matter of cultural convention but is an objective moral truth. Children are born to parents—a mother and a father—and are therefore theirs (and, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, in a certain sense a part of them), though not in any sense that would reduce children to the status of their parents’ property. Indeed, parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children are rooted in their duty to bring up their children properly and educate them well. 

On this account, government has no free-standing or independent decision-making right or authority with respect to children. Children do not belong to the state in the way they belong to their parents. In extreme circumstances, government may intervene to protect children from parental abuse or neglect, but such interventions are only legitimate where parents actually abuse or neglect their children, forfeiting their rights by defaulting on their responsibilities. 

Contemporary progressives, by contrast, view the state as having what amounts to a quasi-parental role. It is true that progressives, at least for the most part, do not seek to entirely replace parents with the state—theirs is not, for example, Plato’s famous stipulation in the Republic that children ought to be held “in common” under the state’s supervision and care, such that “neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent.” But they do view the state as having a measure of direct authority over children that rivals, and at times may even supersede, the authority of parents. They typically hold that authority over children is shared between the state and the parents. 

Perhaps the most influential proponent of the progressive position is my friend and former Princeton colleague, Dr. Amy Gutmann. Over the course of a distinguished scholarly career that included nearly two decades as President of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Gutmann has mounted vigorous defenses of the state’s right and duty to shape, even independently of parental wishes, the moral character and fundamental beliefs of children. For the sake of forming adult citizens committed to what she describes as the “secular standards” of modern liberal democracies and who are left “free to choose their own [version of] the good life,” she argues that public schools or other governmental institutions “cannot escape looking after children’s souls in many significant and subtle ways.” Between parents and the state, Gutmann maintains, “we have no a priori reason to favor one paternalistic agent over another.”  

A more blunt—to put it politely—expression of the progressive view comes from Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who argues that practices such as homeschooling have been abused by parents who are “ideologically committed . . . to isolating their children from the majority culture and indoctrinating them in views and values that are in serious conflict with that culture.” (The subtext, of course, is that such “ideologically committed” parents are those who are committed to living lives and raising families in conformity with traditional religious and moral values.) Criticizing what she identifies as “absolutist” views of parental rights, Bartholet said in a 2020 interview that: 

In truth, the natural law view of parental rights is far from absolutist—and is neither rooted in nor designed to abet prejudice or bigotry. As I’ve noted, the natural law view’s prima facie parental authority over children’s upbringing and formation is not an exceptionless claim—parental authority can be forfeited and government may, in cases of child abuse or neglect, intervene to protect children from demonstrable harm. In cases of genuine abuse or neglect, such as when parents are harming or abjectly failing to protect their children’s physical health, parental rights can be overridden. The state, acting on its duty to advance and protect the common good, could legitimately step in to remove the child from an objectively harmful or dangerous situation by, for example, temporarily placing the child with a relative or in a foster home until the child’s parents are able (if they indeed become able) to fulfill their parental responsibilities again. 

Still, under the natural law view, the state plays a purely supportive and subsidiary role in the child’s upbringing, moral formation, and overall well-being. When, in extreme situations, the state justly moves to intervene on behalf of the child, the state’s intervention is still in a sense supplementary to the parents’ fundamental role—never subsuming the parental right, and always moving towards the ultimate goal of restoring the child to his core family unit (though, of course, sometimes this will ultimately be impossible). 

Furthermore—and contrary to Bartholet’s caricature—the natural law view of parental rights does not promote, endorse, or sanction indoctrination. Parents are charged with the grave responsibility of forming their children, to the best of their ability, to be good people and to lead good lives. 

Formation includes the inculcation of certain values, to be sure; all parents should teach their children to conduct themselves honorably and with integrity. Indeed, any notion of strictly-neutralist parenting is absurd; when parents, no matter their fundamental commitments, teach their children that stealing is wrong, that they shouldn’t cheat on exams, that they should keep their promises, and that they should sit with the fellow student who always eats lunch alone, they are acting on normative judgments to inculcate the virtues and values their children need in order to lead good lives.  

But proper formation is not indoctrination. Forming one’s children to be sophists or sycophants, unable to formulate, articulate, and defend their own views in an intellectually robust fashion, is one thing; raising them in accordance with certain religious or moral precepts is something else, and something that all parents inevitably must do. Proper formation encourages the development of an authentic sense of agency and freedom—the freedom to engage in morally worthy choosing—that indoctrination not only fails to impart but actually destroys. 

The critic would point out the cases, and they will always exist, in which parents fail to raise their children in accordance with sound moral values. Perhaps a parent will teach a child that stealing can be good, that you should only keep your promises if it benefits you to do so, or that you should cheat on exams if it helps you to get ahead. And I have no doubt, as the critic would point out, that there are parents who seek to indoctrinate their children, rather than authentically form them to be independent and critical thinkers. But the truth is that the state must be willing to tolerate some abuses of parental rights lest the efforts to prevent the abuses undermine the rights themselves. 

The same is true of other rights—for example, the right to freedom of speech. We rightly tolerate abuses of the right to speak freely, lest our efforts to prevent abuses (by licensing government to engage in censorship) undermine the right. Of course, we draw certain lines. For example, we tolerate the abstract advocacy of violence, but we draw the line at deliberately inciting people to imminent violence. (This distinction is expressly drawn by the Supreme Court in the 1969 case of Brandenburg v. Ohio, which remains the leading precedent on the subject.) Similarly, we tolerate a misguided parent’s teaching his child that stealing is good, but we punish the parent who is convicted of sending his child to rob the local convenience store. 

The progressive approach’s concrete implications—and perhaps indicative of the true intentions all along of some of those seeking to curtail parental rights—can be observed in recent efforts by progressive activists to erode parents’ control over children’s education in order to convert their children to social progressivism. Consider, for example, the recently argued US Supreme Court case Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which progressive activists asked the Court to uphold a decision by Montgomery County, Maryland’s public school system banning parents from opting their children out of programs promoting LGBTQ ideology at the pre-K and elementary school level.  

Montgomery County’s case for subjecting young children to overtly pro-LGBTQ materials hinged fundamentally on this same progressive paternalistic conception of the state’s role in child rearing—the view that the state has an independently-grounded, non-subsidiary role to play in making normative judgments about the sorts of ideas that ought to guide a child’s moral and intellectual upbringing. Defending the policy, the county’s lawyer told the Supreme Court that allowing parents to opt their children out of pro-LGBTQ lessons would risk “exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.” To be frank, the local government’s argument in Mahmoud was that the state has a legitimate role to play in ideologically influencing the moral formation of children enrolled in public schools, at least in part because not doing so would allegedly have a negative impact on other children whose parents seek to raise them with socially liberal moral commitments. (Of course, they are utterly unconcerned with how students whose families hold traditional values are subjected to “stigma and isolation” when they resist pressure to believe that such values are backward or bigoted.) 

For the sake of the supposed comfort of their socially progressive peers, the government in Mahmoud claimed an interest in encouraging all students to adopt views normatively favorable to and disposed toward same-sex marriage, transgenderism, sexual liberation, and hotly-contested conceptions of sexuality and gender identity—and claimed that parents had no right to stop their children from being subjected to what truly was indoctrination. It is in cases like Mahmoud that we see the real reason that many progressives are so keen for organs and institutions of the state, at least when they are dominated by ideological allies of social and cultural progressivism, to “share”—and eventually override, as Montgomery County sought to do through banning opt-outs—parental authority with actual parents.  

The Supreme Court is, I believe, likely to side with … read it all in The Public Discourse