Kirstin Borgerson discusses the nature and limits of parental rights.

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My daughter started elementary school a few weeks ago. She lined up with her new classmates and teacher on the playground and followed them single file into the school on her first day, carrying a backpack weighing nearly as much as she does and wearing her favourite butterfly dress. My heart ached with pride, love, and, if I’m honest, fear. Would her teachers tell me if she was struggling to make friends or if she enjoyed doing extra math problems during recess? Would they tell me if she wanted to be called by a different name? There is so much about my daughter’s daily life I lost access to when she walked through those school doors, and which I’d love to know about. I think this is a common feeling and persists beyond elementary school. Legislation proposed in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan has drawn heavily on the idea of parents’ rights to know things about their children’s lives at school. In light of these developments, I think it is worth talking about what parental rights are, and what they are not.

Let’s begin with an uncontroversial claim: children are human beings and as such have a set of basic human rights. These rights are derived from their status as moral persons; they include rights to be protected against abuse and exploitation as well as rights to access health care, education, and an adequate standard of living. Adults have a broader set of human rights including the right to work, marry, and vote.

Photo Credit: Petr Kratochvil/publicdomainpictures.net. Image Description: A school crosswalk sign.

Much of the recent activism in Canada has been around parents’ right to know if their child has asked to be referred to by a different name or pronouns at school. It might seem, then, that there is a clash of rights in such cases: on the one hand there are children’s rights (the right to choose how they are referred to by teachers and classmates or the right to privacy in withholding information from their parents), and on the other hand there are the parents’ rights (their right to be informed about certain aspects of their child’s life at school). The task, then, seems to be finding a way to balance these competing rights.

But this is incorrect. Philosopher Joseph Millum, author of The Moral Foundations of Parenthood, reminds us that the rights we all have in virtue of being moral persons (and children, recall, are persons!) cannot be overridden by rights acquired by other people as they proceed through their lives, such as property rights or rights over children. As Millum puts it, “the child’s rights are an absolute constraint on the exercise of parental rights”. Children’s basic human rights constrain any rights we want to attribute to parents as parents. This is why, when abusive parents act in ways that threaten the basic moral rights of their children – through sexual violence and exploitation for instance – we don’t have to judge how beneficial such activities might be for the parents or weigh the rights of the various parties in order to declare such acts morally wrong.

Parental rights, it turns out, are quite limited. The sorts of things we might be inclined to say parents have rights over are often responsibilities in disguise (no surprise, fellow parents!). Parents have the right not to be interfered with in the particular ways they discharge their responsibilities: for instance, parents who choose a particular diet (e.g. organic) for their children have the right to do so without interference by others as long as they are discharging their responsibility to provide adequate nutrition. But they can’t decide not to feed their child at all, since this would violate the child’s basic rights.

Are children’s basic rights at stake in cases of choosing a preferred name or pronouns? Or in withholding that information from parents? Rights to self-determination and privacy are typically regarded as among the set of fundamental rights that all people have, and again, children are people. So, yes.

Is there an alternative view of rights that could justify the sorts of interventions pursued by parents’ rights advocates? In a poster entitled, “Back to School Call to Action #1”, the right-wing group Action4Canada encouraged men in particular (“fathers/grandfathers/step-dads/uncles”) to accompany their children on the first day of school “to remind teachers and principals just whose children they are!”. Though a bracketed addition permitted moms to “participate” as well, it is clear that the parental rights in question take the form of men’s property rights. As father of two, Steve Tourloukis from Hamilton, Ontario put it: “My children are my own. I own them. They don’t belong to the school board.” This view of children as property, owned by their fathers, has very deep historical roots and we have very (very) good reasons to reject it along with every other attempt to argue that some humans have a right to own others as property.

When I hear parents say something like “but I would want to know!” in the sorts of cases mentioned by legislators in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, I understand the sentiment. Like most parents, I want to be trusted by my child and included on important changes in her life. But this desire doesn’t rise to the level of a right, and certainly not a right significant enough to outweigh her basic rights.

And happily, there is a way to make this transparency more likely without requiring coercive legislation or use of the notwithstanding clause: be trustworthy. If I would want to know about important changes in my child’s life, I ought to choose every day to build the kind of loving and supportive relationship with her that makes such disclosures more likely. Even so, she may choose not to tell me something about her personal life, and she has that right, as we all do. Fellow parents: if you would want to know – you really, really, would want to know – about your child’s name and pronoun changes at school, then the task of building a trustworthy and safe relationship with your child falls to you, just as it does in every other relationship you have.

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Kirstin Borgerson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University, cross-appointed with Gender and Women’s Studies and with the Department of Bioethics.