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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4366 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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Which is why I support checks and balances to parental authority, just as with any other form of government.

I'm quote fond of checks and balances myself. The relative weight of each authority depends on the situation on the ground, though. In general, I think parents should be given a lot of deference since the state, even well run ones, tend to protects kids worse than their parents. The sky high rates of abuse in the foster care system is an example.

That would give neither parents nor the State authority over children. A child should not be thought of starting as a piece of property, with some protections from abuse tacked on as epicycles; rather, a child should be thought of starting as a human being, equal in every way, and then whatever power and responsibility we give parents are the epicycles. The burden of proof ought to lie not on 'anyone interfering with how a parent raises their children' so much as 'anyone overriding the child's preferences'. Forbidding a carnal relationship between a five-year-old and a fifty-year-old, or forbidding adolescents from practising the unspeakable vice of the Serbians, are examples of things which overcome this burden; forbidding a child from seeing any depiction of the values of the tribe opposite their parents' does not.

I think the issue with no one having authority over children is that they are not capable of acting in their interests and effectively advocating for themselves. You can debate the age of majority and how much authority teenagers should have, but the central case of a small child needs someone to protect them and advocate for them. I think rather than parents being the owner of their children, a better metaphor is that the children are trustees an the parents are trustors. Due to the track record of the state being a bad trustor, I defer to the parents decisions in most, but not all, cases.

The latter case applies both to a child of Red Tribe parents seeing depictions of LGBTQWERTYUIOP+ living fulfilling lives, and a child of Blue Tribe parents learning examples of Western Cultures having the moral high ground over People Of Colour (e. g. the abolition of widow-burning by the British Raj).

While I personally think that having a child be exposed to a lot of perspectives, with an ideally worldly and fair parent giving their own commentary on them, I think the state is too blunt an instrument to effectively administer this type of complex acculturation. My view is that if they are unable/unwilling to protect children in their custody from abuse, they have not demonstrated the competency to administer this type of acculturation.

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