Some parental rights advocates—like the self-proclaimed “bigot” Katy Faust and her ghostwriter Stacy Manning—claim to be children’s rights advocates. They actually redefine and weaponize the idea of children’s rights to promote Christofascism.
Faust and Manning founded Them Before Us, a nonprofit organization that argues—at first glance, seemingly benignly—that adults should place the interests of children before their own interests. But when you scratch beneath the surface of their rhetoric and see what they consider to be children’s rights, you find nothing but an evangelical laundry list of culture war talking points. Children have the “right” to be born (Faust and Manning oppose abortion and IVF), to know and be raised by their biological parents (Faust and Manning oppose marriage equality and no-fault divorce), to have no access to gender-affirming healthcare (Faust and Manning believe it should be “banned for minors”), and to not receive gender and sex education in school. And that is about it.
But Faust and Manning are not content with reducing children’s rights to evangelical screeds against reproductive rights, diversity in families and parenting, gender-affirming healthcare, and sex education—which, I have noted elsewhere, are “all items that actual child advocates understand to be tools to protect and empower children” In their 2021 book named after their organization, Faust and Manning put their disinformation campaign into high gear and claim that “children’s rights are the flipside of parental rights” and that children’s rights “never conflict with parents’ rights” as they are “two sides of the same coin” (p. 4-5).
As a child advocate, child liberation theologian, and child protection professional, let me be clear: children’s rights are not the flipside of the same coin which contains parental rights. Children’s rights are a direct and serious challenge to parental rights.* Parental rights are part of the modern Christofascist movement, originally designed by evangelical homeschool leaders to fight against the United States ratifying the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely ratified treaty in human history. (To date, the United States is the only member nation of the United Nations that has not ratified it.)
Parental rights advocates believe children are either parental property or rental property on loan from God until children become legal adults. Because of this, such advocates do not believe children should have their own rights. Property cannot have rights as property is not a person.
Children’s rights obviously contradict this belief. Children’s rights say, “No, children do not belong to adults.” Moving away from thinking about children as property means seeing parents (and other caretakers of children) as having responsibilities towards children as opposed to rights over children. As stewards of children, parents and caretakers have privileges that enable and empower them to fulfill their responsibilities towards children as efficiently and effectively as possible. But at no point is a child reduced to an object with no rights.
Belonging to someone in the sense of ownership, when we are talking about humans, will always be dehumanizing and objectifying. One human owning another human will never be just or liberating, no matter the age of the human owned. You can and should be owed duties, and receive care, from other humans without having to forfeit your agency and self. In other words, adults can be legally required to provide care and nurturance for children they bring into existence without us requiring those children to essentially be relegated to the legal status of enslaved people until they become adults themselves—at which they can then legally create their own children to control.
While there is a spectrum to parental rights, especially when it comes to how moderate or extreme their expression is, at their core, all parental rights expressions will eventually object to children’s rights. All parental rights expressions require children to belong to adults in at least some way. “Parents have a right to their own children,” Faust and Manning proclaim. As a result, every time a child says, “No, I belong to myself,” it creates all sorts of existential anxiety and chaos.
So many parents simply do not know how to parent if their children cannot be controlled or forced to do their will. All these parents know is authority and using violence to enforce it. This is why so many systems of parenting unravel the instant a child is empowered to say, “No.” This is why toddlers learning “No” is terrifying to so many parents and why most parents who spank will sheepishly and quietly back off from spanking once their children are big enough to hit back.
*Children’s rights are also a challenge to governmental stewardship over children. The legal doctrine of parens patriae, in which a government may assume legal protection of children or intervene against an abusive or negligent parent, must have limits just like parental stewardship must have. Determining what beliefs and actions are in the best interests of children must always be a careful balancing act between children’s rights and the stewardship needs of those children’s families and governments.