Why the Government Can't Raise Your Children

In a recent interview, Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School landed himself in a bit of ideological trouble for his perspective on children needing greater representation in politics. According to Moyn, "There's a divergence of interests between parents and children, and I think it's likelier that young people, not people who are raising families, will have the best insight into the interest of children."

Well, there you have it. Let's find a recent, single college graduate from Harvard and put them in charge of determining what is best for my child. After all, my wife and I merely feed her, clothe her, protect her, comfort her when she's sick, teach her right from wrong, plan for her future, and devote an enormous portion of our lives to making sure hers turns out well. Surely somebody with a political science degree and six months of experience at a nonprofit has insights we've overlooked.

I joke, but beneath Moyn's argument lies an idea I find far more troubling than the quote itself: that the interests of children are somehow separable from the parents responsible for raising them, and that political institutions may be better equipped to determine those interests. This is where modern progressive thought again leaves me behind.

When an ideology struggles to persuade mature adults who have accumulated responsibilities, families, mortgages, careers, and enough life experience to become skeptical of sweeping promises, there is an obvious alternative: reach people before those experiences shape them. Children make a particularly attractive audience, not because children are stupid, but because they are still developing the experience and judgment that adulthood eventually provides. Do you have a better explanation for Drag Queen Story Hour?

A sixteen year old can understand taxation. He probably cannot fully appreciate what it feels like to watch several thousand dollars disappear from a paycheck while simultaneously paying a mortgage, buying groceries, raising children, carrying insurance, saving for retirement, and wondering why the air conditioner has chosen this particular month to die. That's not an insult to the sixteen year old. That's simply part of being sixteen.

In fact, the divergence between the interests of children and their parents that Moyn identifies is precisely why children need parents in the first place. A child wants candy for dinner, but the parent knows better. A teenager wants unrestricted access to his phone, but the parent recognizes dangers he may not. A student wants to skip school, but the parent understands the consequences. The parent's responsibility is not to represent every present desire of the child. It is to protect the interests of the adult that child has not become yet.

And that's where the idea of government increasingly inserting itself between parent and child becomes troubling. There is an enormous difference between protecting children whose parents have failed them and presuming that parents themselves are an obstacle to children's interests. Government absolutely has a role in the former. I want it nowhere near the latter.

The problem is not simply that I trust parents more than politicians. Government and parents approach children from fundamentally different positions. To the state, a child is necessarily one among millions. She is a student ID number, a name on a standardized test, a future taxpayer, a demographic in a report, or another data point used to determine whether some program worked. None of this is inherently sinister. It is simply the nature of government. Institutions operate at scale, and operating at scale requires reducing individuals into categories that can be measured, managed, and regulated.

Parents have the luxury of doing precisely the opposite. I do not have to develop a policy that works reasonably well for three million children. I have to raise mine. I know what scares her, what makes her laugh, where she struggles, where she excels, when she needs encouragement, and eventually I will know when she needs someone to tell her that she is flat out wrong. My decisions do not have to survive a legislative committee, satisfy a teachers union, appease an interest group, or fit neatly into some bureaucratic framework. They have to survive the much more important test of whether I believe they are good for my daughter.

That distinction matters because raising a child is not an exercise in maximizing immediate happiness. Much of parenting is actually the deliberate creation of temporary unhappiness for the sake of long term wellbeing. We make children go to bed when they want to stay awake. We make them apologize when they would rather remain angry. We tell them no when saying yes would be infinitely easier. Eventually, we allow them to fail at things we desperately want them to succeed at because failure itself can teach something our lectures never could. Good parenting requires knowing when compassion means helping and when compassion means refusing to help.

Government is particularly bad at that kind of discretion. Public institutions are built around rules, rights, procedures, and uniformity because of that whole, "all men are created equal," thing in that document nobody cares about anymore. Parenting cannot work that way. Two children in the same family may require entirely different approaches to the exact same problem. One may need a firmer hand while another needs patience. One may thrive with independence while another needs structure. There is no federal regulation capable of capturing the thousand tiny judgments parents make while raising a human being.

And, there is another problem with handing government greater authority over those decisions: government is not some disinterested collection of wise elders sitting above the political fray. Government is made up of people, and people have ideologies, ambitions, prejudices, incentives, and more than occasionally terrible ideas. The political faction controlling an institution today will eventually lose control of it. That should give everyone, left and right, some pause before celebrating government power over children simply because the people currently exercising that power happen to agree with them.

Progressives who believe schools or other public institutions should have greater latitude to challenge conservative parents should ask themselves a simple question: would you construct the same system if Donald Trump personally selected everyone running it? Would you still believe government officials should be able to determine when a parent's values conflict with a child's best interests? Would you still be comfortable allowing schools to introduce children to political or moral ideas over parental objections if those ideas were conservative Christian ones? Louisiana recently passed a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms. Whatever you think of that law, the reaction to it illustrates my point beautifully. The Ten Commandments have profoundly influenced Western moral thought, and suddenly many of the same people comfortable with public institutions introducing children to their preferred social values discovered the dangers of government inculcating values over the objections of parents. And you know what? They have a point.

A progressive parent should be allowed to question why the government is introducing her child to religious teachings she does not share, just as I should be allowed to question why the government is introducing my daughter to social or political ideas I do not share. The principle cannot change depending on whose values happen to be hanging on the classroom wall. However, in regards to the Ten Commandments issues, there is a deeper argument we will focus on in another article. The short of it is: yes, they should be posted.

Yet we're simultaneously entertained by arguments that parents may not possess the best understanding of their children's interests and that younger people should therefore have greater political influence over policies affecting them. So which is it? Is government influence over children dangerous when Louisiana hangs the Ten Commandments on a classroom wall, or are parents themselves merely one competing interest in determining what children should believe? You cannot comfortably hold both positions without eventually explaining where parental authority begins and ends.

Conservatives should be willing to apply the same test in reverse. Government power does not become harmless because our guy happens to be holding it this afternoon. If I would not trust a progressive administration with broad authority to decide what values my daughter should learn, I should be equally cautious about constructing that authority for a conservative administration simply because I happen to like what it would teach. Nobody knows what's better for my family than me, end of argument.

That's the principle that gets lost in these debates. Parental rights are not conservative rights. They are parental rights. The atheist mother, the evangelical father, the progressive couple in Portland, and the conservative family in rural Louisiana all possess the same fundamental interest in directing the upbringing of their children, though I may disagree with them. Protecting that principle necessarily means tolerating parents who will raise their children differently than I raise mine, and that's fine. This is America, one day those children will grow up and experience the world first hand and make judgements of their own.