“As long as you live under my roof. . . ” 

Parents claim the right to make all sorts of decisions regarding their children — in and outside the home. But why? 

 

Two of the most important legal cases in education, Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) and Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education (1987), involved parents and schools in conflict. In Mozert, a group of religious parents wanted their children to be exempt from using a Holt reading series, which contained ideas they thought were contrary to their religious beliefs. In Yoder, the Amish asked to be exempt from compulsory schooling requirements after the 8th grade. The courts eventually supported the Amish parents in their request but decided against the Mozert parents.     

How should we think about these moments, when schools and parents are at odds with each other? To answer this question, it is crucial to think deeply about the moral basis for parents’ educational rights. Why should we respect the rights of parents to control the education of their children? Once we know the moral basis of parents’ rights, we’ll be in a better position to understand the specific rights parents can claim and the limits of those rights.  

When we know the moral basis of parents’ rights, we’re better able to understand the specific rights parents can claim and the limits of those rights. 

Several possible moral ideas serve as the basis of parents’ rights over education. A more popular option is that children benefit when parents are empowered to make educational decisions. That is, parents’ rights at bottom serve the interests of children. Parents generally know and love their children more than anybody else; therefore, they are best positioned to make sound educational decisions on behalf of their children. 

This argument makes intuitive sense and helps establish that parents should be involved in the education of their children. If schools want to benefit children, then they have an obligation to tap into this parental expertise and to do so often. If they don’t try to solicit the help of parents, they may not be benefiting children as much as they could; indeed, they could be harming them.  

There is a limit to how far this argument takes us, though, with regard to educational decisions. The argument seems to depend on the assumption that parents’ decisions will always work to the educational benefit of children — or at least that they make better decisions than others would make. But finding examples of parents who make poor educational decisions for their children is all too easy. Eamonn Callan (1997) brings up the example of a set of parents who spend all their money going to amusement parks rather than buying a musical instrument for a talented and interested child, thereby wasting the child’s musical talent and potential. We can allow parents the right to make such decisions, even while feeling dismay at the parents’ choice. If we want to maintain parental rights to make such decisions, as we should, while granting that such decisions are educationally harmful, then parents’ rights must be based on something other than, or in addition to, the potential educational benefit to children.  

The argument also runs into problems because it assumes that knowledge of the child is sufficient to make productive educational decisions. This assumption is unjustified. We should recognize that sound educational decisions require not only knowledge of the child but also knowledge of the larger world. Because parental expertise only extends to the child, parental rights over education must be of a more limited nature.    

Protecting children’s interests 

This brings up a second argument for parents’ rights in educational decisions, namely, that such rights protect the interests of the parents themselves rather than the interests of children. This position is also not without some merit. If a kidnapper took a young infant away from her birth parents, the child could still grow up healthy and happy, blissfully unaware of her dark history. But, even if this outcome could be guaranteed, the kidnapper should still be condemned because of the emotional devastation the kidnapping would cause the birth parents. Being allowed to play the role of parents is clearly important and meaningful to parents themselves. As Callan (1997) points out, parenting is often an essential part of our adult identities. It matters to us how well we do as parents, and success at parenting largely revolves around education. We should therefore give parents the rights to undertake the educational tasks that are so closely tied to their own identity and sense of well-being.  

This argument, though, is also limited. James Dwyer (1998) has written how this parent-centered view seems to treat children as instrumental to the happiness of their parents. In the language of ethics, they are being treated as “means” rather than “ends in themselves.” He also notes that the parent-centered argument strangely implies that one person’s interests (the parent’s) can justify control over another person’s (the child). In every other area of life, we can’t control people simply because we have an interest in a relationship with them. It may be very important to my identity to marry a certain celebrity, but this does not give me the right to control that person, to marry her, or to subject her to my educational authority. Simply put, our interests in particular relationships usually don’t give us authority over others. Unless we can show that there is something unique about the parental relationship that justifies this authority, then we have instrumentalized children in a morally problematic way.   

There are reasons why we should think of the parent-child relationship  as being unique. The uniqueness does not derive from the strong interests parents have in the relationship, however, but in the work that they invest in him or her. In no other relationship is one person so helpless and in need of constant care. In no other relationship do people invest such intensive and unrecognized physical, mental, and emotional labor. In no other relationship does one person sacrifice for another in quite the same way. The duration and intensity of the care is unique, as is the way that the labor is bound up with human identity in the particular social practice of parenting. This sacrificial labor matters. Recognition of this labor is what justifies a robust conception of parental rights, and it also points to the limits of such rights.  

Sacrificial labor 

The moral value of parental labor is beginning to be noticed by political theorists and philosophers. Anca Gheaus (2012) asks a strange but seemingly simple question: Why should biological parents be allowed to keep the infants that they give birth to? We could, after all, imagine different ways of distributing infants to parents. We could reassign infants to parents who are the most responsible and conscientious, or from those who have already had children to those who have not (maybe due to infertility). Gheaus’s answer to this question is partly that the birth mother is the one who has suffered the pain and endured the toll of the pregnancy, labor, and delivery. It disrespects the labor of mothering to take the baby away from the biological parents and “redistribute” it in the service of other social goals. 

If this sacrificial labor matters when it comes to keeping the child, then it also should matter after the child has been born (Warnick, 2013, 2014). The labor does not cease at birth. The pain of recovery and nursing, the diaper changes, the late nights and early mornings, the stress and worry, the potty training, the cooking and cleaning — these are experiences that demand our respect and all carry moral weight. We do not pay parents for this work; that would illegitimately bring the rewards of one moral sphere, the economic marketplace, into the sphere of the family. Instead, we honor this work by granting parents the right to make certain decisions for their children.  

But why does sacrificial labor imply an educational right rather than, say, simply an associational right to spend time with a child? The nature of the right that we give to parents should align with the purposes that drive the work of parenting, i.e., parents should be given rights that allow them to accomplish the goals behind their sacrificial labor.  

So, why do parents perform this labor? There are surely many reasons. Some parents simply feel a sense of responsibility to the children they have brought into the world. Evidence suggests, though, that parents also hope to enjoy current and future intimate relationships with the children for whom they labor. For example, a Pew Research Center survey found that most parents say the relationship with their children will be a key factor in their own future happiness (Taylor, Funk, & Clark, 2007). Children provide a certain sort of “relationship good” (Brighouse & Swift, 2009), which is an important feature of human life. This intimate relationship is the goal at which the parental labor points. The possibility of intimate relationships between parents and children depends significantly on the sort of people that the children become. Intimacy is increased when children grow to become people that the parents respect and value. It is enhanced when children come to share the traditions and ideals of their parents. It really matters to the believing parent when a child also becomes a believer. The religious parents may obviously still love a “wayward” child, but one avenue of closeness has been closed.  

The right to invite 

The labor of parenting, which is performed for the sake of the intimate relationships, creates a specific right: the right to invite children into a life that the parents value and treasure, often the life that they themselves lead. This “right to invite” allows parents the opportunity to live shared lives — lives of common beliefs and commitments — with their children. While it doesn’t guarantee that children will accept the invitation, the right to invite allows parents the opportunity to expose children to their own way of life.  

Exposure to a way of life involves not only verbally teaching children what to believe and what not to believe but also initiating them into the communities, rituals, and practices that constitute a particular life. To deeply understand a life, we need to get a sense of living a life “from the inside.” Thus, parents can baptize their children, require them to go to church, oblige them to participate in rites of passage or community events, involve them in political rallies, and so forth. This is the grain of truth in the otherwise heavy-handed parental statement, “As long as you live under my roof, you will obey my rules.” Parents who are actively sacrificing for their children should be allowed the opportunity to expose children to the practices that make their own lives meaningful.   

The right to invite has various implications for how schools treat children and interact with families. Consider the famous U.S. Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969). In that case, schools had suspended children for wearing black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court eventually ruled against the school district’s actions, finding that neither teachers nor students “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Constitutionally, this was an issue of First Amendment freedoms. Morally and ethically, it could also be said to involve the parents’ right to invite. After all, it was not the children’s decision alone to wear the black armbands. The mother and father in the Tinker family were themselves social activists. Wearing the armbands was a family decision. Respect for the right to invite suggests that families can expose their children to their beliefs and ways of living, including practices of social activism. To prohibit this family practice, to prohibit the armbands, was not only a violation  of the students’ First Amendment rights to free speech and expression but also of the parents’ moral right to invite  

More negative than positive 

Generally speaking, the right to invite does not imply that schools have an obligation to agree with or support the invitations offered by the parents. Offering the invitation is the parents’ role, growing out of parental labor. It is not the role of the schools. The right to invite does imply, though, that schools should accommodate certain family-originating practices, particularly where schooling is compulsory and where families don’t have realistic alternatives to public education. Schools should generally accommodate families when prayers have to be offered at certain times of day, for example, or when families have certain dietary restrictions. Schools do not need to support cultural or religious messages, but they should not throw up unnecessary roadblocks to families that would like their invitational practices to continue during the school day.  

So far, the right to invite is more negative than positive. Schools should make accommodations to parents as they invite their children, but they don’t need to endorse or support those invitations. An exception can be made for families who come from cultural minorities that face misunderstanding, distortion, or hostility in the larger society. Groups may be harmfully stereotyped in a way that unfairly undermines the power of the parents’ invitation. If this is the case, schools may have an obligation to supply positive representations of cultural groups and beliefs. Since the larger society may be distorting the right to invite, the institutions of the larger society — schools — may have an obligation to restore a balanced invitation.  

There are limits to what cultural groups, whether threatened or not, can ask schools to do. The limits of the right to invite can be seen when we return to the parental labor that justifies the right. We do have moral obligations to others who perform labor on our behalf; a fair wage for the work performed — or maybe just an expression of gratitude. Notice that this moral obligation only holds when the labor is something we have consented to. Somebody who paints my house neon green without my consent is not performing labor that I must recompense or be grateful for; rather, it is an act of vandalism. But notice, the labor of parenting is often performed without consent from the children. There is a good reason for this: Young children are not competent to give consent nor are they able to live without the labor that is given. The moral importance of consent lingers even though it has been temporarily neglected. We can continue to honor the role of consent, however, by transforming the requirement to obtain consent  into a requirement to develop the ability to consent. Since we are waiving the requirement that labor must be consented to, in other words, we must attend all the more closely to the development of those capacities that make consent possible. We must nurture in children the ability to make judgments for themselves about what to believe and what practices to follow. We must provide the conditions under which children develop autonomy. Children need to develop the autonomy that will allow them eventually to freely accept or reject the invitation offered by their parents.  

Unresolved questions 

Parents, then, can invite children to live the lives they most value. They may not, however, indoctrinate children into that life. By indoctrination I mean a way of educating children that does not allow them exposure to any cultural alternatives. Parents can teach children their beliefs, but they cannot prevent children from hearing about other beliefs. They can require that children participate in cultural practices, but they cannot prevent children from learning about other practices. Notice that on this account, schools and governments cannot indoctrinate either, since they cannot silence the views of parents. Parents have a right to make their invitation, but they cannot make this the only invitation that their children receive. 

The ideas developed here don’t resolve all the questions that might arise in parent-school conflict. Consider again the Mozert case, where the parents wanted their children to be exempt from the Holt reading series. The books in that series were focused on the civic aims of exposing children to different beliefs and ideas, the sort of thing we tend to believe develops student autonomy. According to my analysis, the religious parents clearly have a right to invite, based on their sacrificial labor. They should be allowed to teach their children about what they believe and do so in a fairly demanding way. What they can’t do is precisely what they were asking to do, namely, to prevent the sympathetic exposure to alternative beliefs that is essential for developing both civic tolerance and individual autonomy.  

Parents have a right to invite their children into their own ways of life, a right that is limited by the children’s need to develop autonomy. 

With these fundamental principles in place, though, a series of questions that focus on the particular context of the schools and families emerges. We know that after the Mozert students were denied an accommodation, many parents removed their children from public schools entirely to attend home schools or religious schools. If we want to develop student autonomy, might it have been better to grant the exemption, thereby keeping the students in public schools where they were more likely to encounter cultural difference on a day-to-day basis (Macedo, 2000)? We might also wonder whether the sort of religious fundamentalism endorsed by the parents is being unfairly undercut by the larger secular and consumer-oriented society. If so, as Callan argues, should schools have offered the Mozert parents positive representations of Christian lives within the curriculum, which is something the Holt series failed to offer (Callan, 1997)? 

These questions illustrate where the debate about parents’ rights over education should focus. The focus should be on questions relating to specific situations. Probing the moral basis of the right to invite helps us address the big issues: Parents have a right to invite their children into their own ways of life, a right that is limited by the children’s need to develop autonomy. With these big questions addressed, we can turn to these specific contextual questions that, in reality, should be front and center in the debate.  

References 

Brighouse, H. & Swift, A. (2009). Legitimate parental partiality. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 37 (1), 43-80. 

Callan, E. (1997). Creating citizens: Political education and liberal democracy. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. 

Dwyer, J.G. (1998). Religious schools v. children’s rights. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 

Gheaus, A. (2012). The right to parent one’s biological baby. Journal of Political Philosophy, 20 (4), 432-455. 

Macedo, S. (2000). Diversity and distrust: Civic education in a multicultural democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education, 827 F.2d 1058 (6th Cir. 1987). 

Taylor, P., Funk, C., & Clark, A. (2007, July 1). Generation gap in values, behaviors: As marriage and parenthood drift apart, public is concerned about social impact. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2007/07/Pew-Marriage-report-6-28-for-web-display.pdf  

Tinker v. Des Moines School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969). 

Warnick, B.R. (2013). Understanding student rights in schools: Speech, religion, and privacy in educational settings. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.  

Warnick, B.R. (2014). Parental authority over education and the right to invite. Harvard Educational Review, 84 (1), 53-71. 

Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972). 

  

Citation: Warnick, B.R. (2015). “As long as you live under my roof. . . ” Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (7), 36-40.