Over the last decade, a new civil rights movement has developed both in the United States and around the world. These new activists are advocating on behalf of parents, many of whom feel that their interests have not been adequately represented in the formation of state law. Dating back to the founding of the United States, parents have been given the autonomy to choose how to raise their children. Lately, though, states have become more proactive in limiting the rights of parents. Child protective services (CPS) divisions, state family courts, and other state-run entities have begun to extinguish parental rights in a large number of cases, taking custody of children that might have otherwise stayed with their parents. Parents deserve to have more rights and protections because it is in the best interests of the child to remain with her natural parents whenever possible, because states fail to properly recognize the nuances of each parent-child dynamic, and because the fundamentals of freedom demand that parents be given due process rights before having their custody interests extinguished.
The role of state-run organizations like CPS and family courts is to look after the well-being of the child. With that in mind, it is important to recognize the research that suggests that children end up with much better outcomes overall when they are allowed to remain with their biological parents (Brodzinsky & Pinderhughes, 2013). Even for all of their potential faults, biological parents tend to have the most incentive to properly parent their kids, and children seem to value the connections that they have to those parents. This is especially true in an era where there is a shortage of people willing to adopt. While in an ideal scenario, any child taken away from a parent would immediately have a loving, supportive home to go to, the reality is that children often bounce from foster home to foster home while the state tries to find a proper place for the child to stay. Practically speaking, children in these environments are much more prone toward delinquency, and they have worse outcomes educationally and career-wise. The much better option is to allow children to stay with their biological parents. Parental rights must be strengthened for this to become a reality.
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States have shown themselves unable to properly recognize the nuances of every parent-child situation. While there are certainly situations where a child will be in some kind of danger while staying with her biological parents, the vast majority of situations where the state intervenes does not present this kind of emergency. Parenting, it seems, is a very difficult thing, and even parents that the average person would call “good” is bound to make a certain number of mistakes. State courts are ill-equipped to deal adequately with the different nuances that go into parenting. They tend to treat all cases with the same broad brush, and rather than digging into the individual details of cases, they use an unworkable standard to determine the validity and worthiness of a parent. This can often lead to disproportionately bad results for minority parents (Font, Berger, & Slack, 2012). In Massachusetts, for instance, the child-protection agencies have attained such power and influence that they are able to threaten mothers with child removal if those mothers choose not to divorce their husbands. These situations have proven dangerous for the family unit, and this represents the kind of unworkable suggestion that undermines the future of the child overall.
In addition, the fundamentals of freedom demand that parents are given more due process before their rights are violated in this way. Under the constitution, people are due both procedural and substantive due process before they can be deprived of certain forms of property (Cheatham et al, 2012). While children most certainly belong in their own classification, parents have something similar to a property interest in their children. As it currently stands, states are able to take away children or place burdensome conditions onto parents without a dispositive showing that the parent has violated the rules. Simply put, parents are losing their children based upon the suspicion of certain forms of activity, and the constitution seems to provide protections against this kind of government intrusion.
Some argue that children are not property. In fact, they are human beings with their own specific rights that must be protected by the state because the child has no capacity to protect his own rights. While it is certainly true that children are not property, it is also true that parents have some protectable interest in continuing parenthood. That interest should not be extinguished on mere suspicion alone.
Likewise, some argue that removing children as early as possible is the best thing for the child because it will keep the child from some of the psychological damage inflicted by a bad home. This is the sort of thinking that tends to put undue burdens on poor families, and it deprives parents of their right to raise their children in the manner that they choose. Ultimately, the state should not be in the business of making distinctions on what kind of parenting is better than another kind. Unless the child happens to be in some form of danger or parents have violated the law in some tangible way, the state should not be parsing different parenting types to determine one’s worthiness over another.
Parental rights have come under fire over the last few years, and they seem to be in direct contrast with the children’s rights movement. Parents seem to be losing their hold on their children, and perhaps more importantly, on their ability to choose their own outcomes for their children. This is not right, and parental rights should be strengthened because children do better when they are supported by their own parents, because the state does not have the capacity to offer a complete case-by-case analysis, and because constitutional principles of due process protect the parenting interests of the parents.
- Brodzinsky, D., & Pinderhughes, E. (2013). Parenting and child development in adoptive families. Handbook of parenting, 1, 279-312.
- Cheatham, G. A., Hart, J. E., Malian, I., & McDonald, J. (2012). Six things to never say or hear during an IEP meeting: Educators as advocates for families. Teaching Exceptional Children, 44(3), 50-57.
- Font, S. A., Berger, L. M., & Slack, K. S. (2012). Examining racial disproportionality in child protective services case decisions. Children and youth services review, 34(11), 2188- 2200.
