Thank you for saying this. My father used to taunt me at least once a week with the impossibility of running away or surviving on my own, precisely because of the laws and customs which made independence impossible and ensured that ‘decent’ people would consider children parential property, not human beings in their own right.
Every human being begins life as a child. When human beings are taught that individuality and social citizenship begins as soon as they are asked for, and thus it ceases to be that every adult must pass through a period of acculturation to servitude before being allowed the formal status of freedom- then and only then will tyranny become a memory. Today, nearly every adult even in a liberal society has the psychological shadow of tyranny as their first reference. Collectivism and authoritarianism thus feel natural to us, the first place we return to in times of stress and fear. Liberal socities are so fragile largely because we build them upon the foundations of millions of little patriarchal household dictatorships. We teach each person to be property for their first decade and a half and then wonder why it is so difficult to sustain a free society.
]]>Well gee, I guess even slave-status is too good for those punk kids. The only proper remedy for their insubornation is the kind of treatment commonly reserved for cattle and dogs.
]]>Have you seen this?: To Curb Truancy, Dallas Tries Electronic Monitoring
]]>Yes, I think that if a child chooses to leave home, then that ends the parents’ responsibilities of caregiving. If the child changes her mind later and wants to return home, then the parents have a right not to take her back in, if they so choose. (That’s not to say that they don’t have any moral calling to do so; I think they do. But a calling of compassion, not a calling of justice.)
For what it’s worth, that last answer is just a special case of a more general principle: I think that the parents always have a right to abandon responsibilities of caregiving, of their own accord, even without the child having chosen to leave the house. (For very young children, considerations of proportionality would require that they make some effort to turn the child over to a willing alternative caregiver, rather than just exposing it out in the woods. For older children there’s a correspondingly weaker duty, to the extent that the child can make it by her own devices.) Again, I think parents have a moral calling not to act like that, but I don’t think that trying to force someone who would rather abandon their child, to take care of her instead, would serve anybody’s interests, or the interests of justice.
Natasha,
Concerning your friend’s situation: appalling, but (sadly) all too unsurprising. There have been many people who have tried to create grassroots refuges for street kids and kids trying to flee an abusive or otherwise intolerable home — the equivalent of battered women’s shelters, but for youth trying to escape abusive or otherwise intolerable guardians.
Of course, every time somebody tries, they get threatened and quickly shut down by the cops. Because the State would rather operate through bureaucracy and professional busybodies who force their way into socioeconomically suspect homes and rescue
children or teens in peril. Rather than actually respecting children or teens enough to attend to the desires and needs that they express, through their chosen words and their deliberate actions.
There will come a day when the phrase runaway child
will strike the same moral tone, in people’s ears, as the phrase fugitive slave.
I only hope that it is soon.