The Tyranny of Parents
Most parents, and most adults, don’t like to think about parents as tyrants. Usually instead parents are framed as selfless and hard-working, while children are framed as entitled and needy. Kids are lovable, but also demanding and draining. Parents, we’re told in sitcoms and in parenting advice columns, have to sacrifice time, energy, and life goals in order to cater to the whims and irrational impulses of the young people they live with. There’s a Mother’s Day and a Father’s Day but no Children’s Day. Why? Because every day is Children’s Day.
But parents have enormous power over their children, and little accountability to those children in either law or practice. Parents are still allowed to strike their children throughout the US. Some states put more restrictions on this right than others. Delaware, for example, doesn’t allow parents to hit their child with a closed fist, restricting the beating of your child to spanking. Oklahoma, on the other hand, specifically allows parents to strike their child with a switch or paddle.
Even in theory, then, the state allows parents to use violent physical force against children as punishment if the children don’t do what parents tell them. And in reality, the situation is significantly worse. Few people outside the home witness what parents do to the children and young people inside it. Some state laws say that parents are only allowed to strike children for punishment. But who is policing the line between reasonable punishment and a blow struck in anger or simply out of sadism? As in any domestic violence situation, children are likely to fear retaliation if they go to outside authorities.
Parents in short have wide latitude to strike their kids, and most use it. Seventy percent of Americans in 2012 said kids sometimes need a “good, hard spanking.” Two-thirds in 2013 said they’d spanked their own children.
Imagine if your boss were allowed to spank you or hit you with a stick if you turned a project in late or cursed in the office. You’d consider that boss unprofessional and abusive.
Spankings, in particular, when performed without consent by one adult on another, could reasonably be seen as sexual abuse. Why is it different when children or teens are spanked? Jillian Keenan makes a persuasive case that some adults who spank kids experience sexual pleasure, and that kids not infrequently experience spanking as sexual abuse as well. If an adult had the power to decide when and how to strike another adult with impunity in the name of “punishment” or “correction,” we’d see that as tyrannical. Why is it acceptable when the same behavior is visited on children, who are weaker, smaller, and have fewer ways to protest?
Parents don’t have to use physical violence to torment their children. They have broad latitude to make young people’s lives miserable in a wide range of ways. Parents can for example forbid children to talk to their friends. They can forbid them to leave the house. They can force young people to eat foods they don’t want or to go hungry. A father on twitter earlier this year boasted about refusing to allow his child to eat lunch until she’d figured out how to open a can of beans, and people were outraged. But the truth is that lots of parents turn meals into a battleground, demanding young people eat or don’t eat this or that food, and there’s nothing children can do about it.
Again, if another adult took away your phone and locked you in your room as punishment for being late to work, or insisted you eat your vegetable on pain of getting no food at all, most people would consider that unjust and tyrannical. But when it’s parents imposing these rules on their children, it’s considered normal or unremarkable in most cases.
Some of the worst parental cruelty is directed at queer youth. Young people often don’t feel safe coming out to their parents—and with good reason. Parents often throw queer kids out of their homes, or make life so miserable that queer youth leave. Only around seven percent of young people are LGBT, yet they make up forty percent of homeless youth.
The systems put in place to oppress marginalized people are generally justified on the grounds that the marginalized people in question are incapable of making wise choices or of caring for themselves. This has been the rationale for laws and customs which target Black people, women, the mentally ill, and the poor. Tyrannical power is always excused as necessary by the people who wield it.
Similarly, parents and other adults don’t deny they have broad-reaching power to immiserate their children. Instead, they insist that this power is necessary. If you cannot beat children, or lock them in their rooms, or deny them food, or take their cell phones, how can you ensure their obedience and safety? Parents, the argument goes, must have sweeping power to discipline with impunity, or young people will come to harm.
It’s true that very young children cannot fend for themselves. They need protection and guidance. If a toddler is heading for the street, you want to pull that toddler back without asking for permission.
But the fact that children are vulnerable and rely on parents is more, not less, reason to be careful about the exercise of arbitrary authority. Research has clearly shown that physical punishment is traumatic for children, for example. Young people who are struck by their parents are more likely to have mental health problems, and may be more aggressive and antisocial. Physically striking children also leads, inevitably, to physical injuries.
There’s little research on the long-term effects of grounding children, or of other discipline techniques. Indeed, almost all parenting advice focuses on whether these disciplines “work”—that is, whether they make kids do what parents want. The fact that there’s so little discussion about how it affects the young people in question—whether it makes them miserable, whether there are long term mental health issues—speaks volumes about whose rights and whose well-being are, and aren’t, centered in our society.
So, what can be done to liberate children? Stories of abuse often prompt calls for greater state intervention. Unfortunately, though, Child Protective Services and the foster care system are often quite abusive in themselves. CPS is biased against poor and Black families, and may harass parents and remove children because of unexamined prejudice against the parents, rather than because the children are being abused. Foster parents may abuse children as well and often face few consequences. State intervention may be necessary or helpful in some extreme instances. But in a society where children’s freedom and rights are not valued, police and state authorities aren’t going to value them either.
In fact, the disempowerment of and contempt for young people is so built into all of our institutions and ideology that it’s difficult to think of effective ways to reduce adult power over children. But there are a few things we could do to try to move in a better direction.
First, states and the federal government should make it clear that corporal punishment is unacceptable, period. School officials are still allowed to spank or paddle students in 19 states; those laws should be repealed. Laws protecting a parent’s right to strike their children should also be eliminated.
Another measure that might be helpful is lowering the voting age. Marginalized groups throughout history have pushed for the vote as a symbolic and practical measure. Voters are seen as equal citizens, and politicians have incentives to try to address their concerns and priorities. Voting rights wouldn’t transform parent/child dynamics. But a society which valued the voices of young people would be a society more open to treating young people with dignity and respect.
One policy Democrats have been considering that would help young people is free college. Currently, skyrocketing college costs mean that young people are frequently dependent on their parents for financial support well into their 20s. Parents regularly use this as leverage, demanding that young people take certain courses, or even forcing their children into the closet on threat of losing college funding. If young people could attend college for free in state schools, it would be a lot easier for them to get out from under abusive parents more quickly.
Improving the social safety net in other ways could also help young people a great deal. Free, no questions asked housing for the homeless, for instance, would be a huge boon to young people living on the street. It would also mean that children could leave abusive home situations without having to fear that they’d end up without shelter.
Finally, parents can help their children by letting them know that the way young people are treated is often wrong. One of the most debilitating powers adults have over young people is the power to deny their experience of oppression and injustice. Parents tell their kids that they are being beaten, or grounded, or denied food, for their own good. Explaining to young people that they have the right to autonomy, privacy, and bodily integrity is vital precisely because those rights are so frequently violated. If we care about our children, we need to give them the ability to tell us when our care is not care, and the power to resist when we are harming them.
None of this is going to prevent parents from exercising their power over their children in cruel and unjust ways. Our society, as currently constituted, gives adults enormous, disproportionate power over young people. It’s hard to even imagine how that could change. But you certainly can’t free anyone until you realize that they’re in a cage. No one likes to think of themselves as a tyrant. But if we don’t want to abuse our power, we need to recognize we have it.
Featured Image is Vice and Virtue Misery, by Jules David
