Parental Rights and Tough Love

In my last post, I tried to argue that parental rights are not absolute. This much I will take as evident even if we don't talk much about it. Parental rights are bounded for two reasons: the fact that children are people and not objects that one owns; the fact we live in communities with other people who also have rights.  Moreover, I tried to argue that we are responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of our actions.

There is nothing shocking here. We just don't normally apply this standard to child rearing which is often treated as a purely private matter.  I might point out that what I am saying is neither shocking nor new. I am not inviting the state, say, into a new realm of power. We have operated with these principles for a very long time and the world has not fallen apart.  And, it has not because these things make sense. What I'd like to do in this blog is continue this argument and loop back into a consideration of how this applies to tough love.

The idea that we are responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of our actions should not shock people either. Responsibility can take several different forms. We often think of it in terms of legal responsibility (who has to pay the piper, as it were, if something goes wrong). I'd argue that this is both an important and limited way of thinking about rights and responsibilities. There are a bunch of other reasons why we might want to think about the consequences of our actions outside the framework of legal responsibilities. For instance, we basically use this standard with our own kids when we tell them to do their homework. We do so because a reasonably foreseeable consequence of not doing one's homework is that one will fail.  We teach our kids to have enough money in the bank for rent or mortgage because the reasonably foreseeable consequences of not doing so is that one will get thrown out of one's apartment or lose one's house to the bank.

One of the problems I have with "tough love" (and, to be frank, I have several) is that it reduces the scale of parenting to a relationship between a parent and a child. It pretends that there are no reasonably foreseeable consequences to parenting actions.  Let me immediately qualify what I am saying. I am *not* arguing that most of the time there are serious consequences whereby parenting strategies spill out of control and cause problems. Kids make mistakes. They cause problems. Hockey balls and baseballs break windows, bikes drive over plants, gardens get squished, cars get bumped. This is all the normal stuff of childhood and, most importantly for my argument, there is no ill intent here. It is impossible to foresee every problem that a child can cause just by being a kid and doing kid-like things. In instances where kids cause problems doing kid-like things, there are other non-legal responses that we should use.  Those might even be something to consider in some future post.

What I am interested in here is not finding some ways to criminalize ordinary kid stuff or hold parents criminally responsible for a window broken by a neighbourhood baseball game (although parents should warn kids of possible dangers and problems). There is a difference between an errant throw accidentally going through a window and someone intentionally throwing a projectile at house to indicate, oh, I don't know, political disagreement or something like that.  One is an accident; the other is intended as a violent statement.

What is interesting is that the standard I am trying to stake out seems to apply here. The problem with mistakes is that, by definition, it is difficult to foresee the consequences because ... well ... they involve what are unintended consequences that, by definition, cannot be foreseen. Don't believe me? How many times have your heard someone say "that was an accident" as a way of saying "I can't be held responsible." (Even in instances of accidents, you might want to do something for someone who has suffered as a result of an unintended consequence but, again, a discussion for another day). Under law, in most instances, you are not responsible for an accident. If I mistakenly take a packet of, say, bolts from the store that is something different from intentionally robbing the store.  I should still return the bolts -- because, the act of keeping them after I discover my error is theft! -- but the act of taking them is, in itself, not a crime because I lacked the necessary intent.

A consequence that is reasonably foreseeable, it seems to me, falls somewhere between accident and intent.  One of the reasons that we don't criminalize the actions of kids is that they lack the necessary mental capacity to consider the consequences of their actions. Playing baseball is fun so you play baseball without thinking that you could break a window. Adults are different and this is one of the things that makes people adults. Adults can and so should consider the potential implications of their actions (and we teach kids to do so, as I noted above). As a society we have a whole group of crimes (called negligence) that involve the consequences of actions people should have foreseen.  So ... my point: nothing particularly radical or unusual here.

How does this relate to tough love? This way: I have found in discussions with tough love proponents that they don't really think through the implications of their actions.  They focus only on the immediate problem which is, in one form or another, a disobedient child. I've had a number of conversations that answer this question: what does one do with a disobedient child?  Of course, the answer depends completely on how disobedient. In instances where children have really misbehaved -- and have no illusions, the examples I heard involved some pretty serious stuff -- one of the responses was that the child cannot live under your roof. You've heard this before: "my house, my rules."

I will leave to one side the efficacy of that. I find it more of a slogan than a good way to run a family, but ... perhaps another day. Let's allow that one accepts that injunction: you follow my rules or out you go.  What happens next?

When I talk to tough love advocates they fall into two camps. Some treat this as something akin to a game of chicken with one/s own children: '"they'll blink and in the child's tearful remove, the parent's authority is re-established."  The child will go away and learn the lessons of hard knocks, returning later perhaps understanding the rules and accepting them, even if grudgingly.

These things can happen but there are other reasonably foreseeable consequences. What happens, one might ask, if you deny a person shelter? What is the reasonable and foreseeable consequence? Well, one option is that the child breaks down and accepts their place in the pecking order. The other is that they will seek shelter elsewhere. Likewise, what happens if you deny someone food? They could beg you for food, or they could seek it elsewhere. I don't think this is an economic calculation. I think it is built around emotion. But, particularly in instances of significant age differentials like a parent/child relationship there are uneven burdens of understanding the implications of actions. After all, the adult is the adult and a child is a child.

What does it mean to seek shelter. Well, one could sleep on the streets, one could go to a homeless shelter, but in my experience there are two other common results that tough love advocates don't discuss:

1. Couch surfing, whereby your child lives with others (or bunch of others who feed, cloth, and shelter them, who provide a shower, sometimes council, entertainment -- TV -- and social interaction). 
2. Break and enter: now homeless youth seek out shelter, warmth, food, hygiene by breaking into homes that they believe are empty. 

No one is saying these are the only responses and that is not my point. My point is that they are reasonably foreseeable consequences, even if we don't talk about them. It is not difficult to see how, say, a fairly young person (say, late teens as an example) if deprived of shelter might end up doing things that they would not have done under other circumstances.  If someone were cold and hungry, it is foreseeable that they will take actions to be warm and not hungry even if those actions move them outside the boundaries of the law or into a situation where they need to rely on the kindness of other people. The target, in the case of breaking into someone's house to look for food or something to rob or even a place to sleep if the person were away, will likely be a target of opportunity; that is: their action will not be something that is well planned out. And that simply highlights the randomness of the crime for those whose house is, say, robbed. 

In both instances, the discourse of tough love and its supposed merits fails to grapple with this. I do know there are worse things that can and do happen in instances of homelessness, but let's stick to this point to finish off the argument. In both instances, the tough love advocate has ignored a reasonable consequence. When they say "my house, my rules" and suggest that showing a disobedient child the door, they don't also say "my house, my rules and by following my advise, you could be creating a situation where your wayward child will rob your neighbour or break into their house." Instead, they paint the act of forcing homelessness on a child as one that is, more or less, consequence free. The worst that will happen, this discourse implies, is that your child will be lonely and sad and uncomfortable for a night. You will have either (a) taught them a lesson or (b) removed a dangerous (in the case of a seriously disobedient child) problem. All you need to do, I've heard tough love advocates suggest, is have the will -- the internal fortitude -- to take this action.

My point is that that is a limited perspective. Even if a parent were going to take this action, they should be fully aware of its potential consequences.  IOW, you should take the action knowingly because, in effect, what you are being urged to do is not just make someone comfortable, but to offload your problem onto someone who, chances are, you don't know. Imagine a particularly grave situation: a child is stealing from you to support their drug habit. What do you think happens if you refuse that child entry to your home? Do you think their drug habit stops? Do you think they stop stealing? Is it, say, equally foreseeable that they will steal from someone else? I am not trying to say that these are not difficult decisions for parents, or anguished. But, in this example, the act of forcing homelessness on the child is taking a chance with other people's property. You are gambling that the action you have taken -- turning a thief lose on your neighbourhood -- will not cause problems. 

My argument has problems. I don't want to disguise that.  If you are not going to throw your son or daughter out of the house, what are you going to do?  How long is an adult responsible for their child? What of adult children still living with their parents? Should one leave one's self in a potentially dangerous situation to protect others who might not even need the protection? 

My discussion of this point has been far from perfect. I don't have easy answers as to how to deal with disobedient children. What I am arguing is that tough love is wrong (in an ethical and potentially legal way) because urges people to offload their problems and not think about the consequences. It ignores that fact that the actions you are taking have foreseeable consequences for other people.  While I don't have easy answers to the problems our kids might have, I do think that this is not the right approach. I don't think it is the right approach for the child and I don't think its right to offload a problem onto some other person who does not know that the problem is even coming. 

Tough Love: Reasonable and Foreseeable Problems

What responsibility do we have for other people?  There is nothing new in this question and I am not the one to answer it.  However, lately I have been thinking about "tough love," a sort of layover from another time that still rears its head in different ways. I know people who swear by tough love as a child rearing strategy. I will confess that I have found this odd. There is a history here, a sort of tradition of looking at children -- even, and perhaps your own children -- in a certain jaded way. I've heard parents say, for instance, "that child is testing you" to other, newer parents. I don't propose to review that history. Instead, what I thought I would do is try to think through some of the implications of tough love, for both kids, parents, and your neighbours.  In a future post, I will discuss some of the other things I find odd about tough love. In this one, I'd like to begin to address an issue that is not often considered: what are the reasonably foreseeable problems that come out of a tough love approach to child rearing?

This question is not often asked and that is, in itself, odd. Someone might say "how you raise your kids is a private matter" and by this they mean several things. One of the things that they mean, to put the matter bluntly, goes something like this "how I raise my child is my business; not yours." You (other person) have no right to intrude on my child rearing. My family is private. And, yet, I want to try to convince you that this is not exactly or precisely the case, nor should it be.

This is so because child rearing is not a right like other rights because you are dealing, by definition, with at least one other person. I might have a right to, say, in the privacy of my own home watch what I want to watch on TV. I do recognize that we could push this example to its limits and likely reject even that assertion but I hope you get my point. Whether I watch Stargate or Doctor Who is really no one else's business. If my neighbour chooses to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie, that is her business. I can't go over to her house, stroll in, and turn the TV off because I consider her selection of holiday movies to be poor. It is private precisely because it has no effect on me. I may like or dislike a personal selection but I don't even know, most of the time, what my neighbour is watching.

Raising children is not like that. While my neighbour's selection of movies has no effect on anyone else, how one raises a child does and in two senses. First, it has an effect on the child. There is no way to claim that the same protected right of privacy applies because being a parent by definition means that you have a duty of care over another person. I recognize that this statement can get messy in rapid fashion. No everyone chooses, for instance, to be a parent. Different people have different understandings of what care means. But, it is also, I think, widely recognized that we do have responsibilities. We have responsibilities as citizens (to obey the law, for instance, and if we object to the law to do so in specific ways). And, we have responsibilities as parents that are enshrined in law.

Most of us think this is right. While most of us would say that we need to be careful not to impose our values on others with regard to child rearing  (we might, for instance, want to protect parents right to make certain decisions for their kids.  Children, for instance, should likely not be forced by their communities or the government to, say, play a certain sport or musical instrument. This can and should be a private familial decision). But, we also recognize that there needs to be a limit to this and that limit occurs when the duty of care for the child has been breached. Don't believe me? Watch how upset people get the next time there is a news story about social services not reacting quickly enough to protect a child who was being abused by their parents and ends up with serious injuries.

No one is saying that this boundary line is easy to define. In fact, I'd be deeply wary of people who think it is. The point is that virtually everyone recognizes that it is there and it is important precisely because we are dealing with human lives and not TV show choices.  From the beginning, then, as a society we recognize (and, have long recognized) that the right of parental control over children is not an absolute right. However contentious this may be in practice, we recognize that the child, at the least, has rights too (to proper nourishment, to education, the protection from cruelty, etc.).

Second, and more controversially, this is also a situation parental actions have effects on other people.  I would contend that those other people have rights too. This might sound a bit odd, but let me use an example to illustrate my point. Imagine a situation where my neighbour elects to raise her child with a certain attitude toward the property of other people. She certainly has the right to teach her children about her views, explain why they are correct, etc. But, what happens if these views, say, are some sort of bizarre anarchistic type of thing and her son (I am just making this example up) elects to burn down my shed. Is it OK that he has done so because he is just enacting a private matter of his own education determined in a familial context?

I am arguing no.  I have a right to protection and safety for myself and my property (in some measure) and this right is important too. If my neighbour (say, someone on my street -- and I hasten to add that my neighbours are really good people, again this is just an example) encourages her children to commit crimes, endanger the lives of others, destroy their property, she cannot argue that this is a private matter when it starts to happen and I should have no say in the matter and no recourse. One's right to raise a child how one wants is, in other words, bounded by the right to life of others, to their security, and their protection.

I fully recognize that the example I made up was silly and I did so just to illustrate a point. The point I want to illustrate is not that I have rights (to life, security of person, etc.) because that is patently obvious. We all knew that already and if that was all I had to put on the table, I should have stopped this blog some time ago. Instead, the point I want to make is that we can and should have a test that we can keep in mind in determining whether the actions of a parent are causing potential danger to others through their child-rearing strategies. In other words, we can create a mental framework, as it were, that can help us make determinations about parental actions.

This is even trickier but I'd propose a standard against which we can measure actions and their legitimacy.  The problem with my example is that it is so binary that it does not capture the shades of grey within which most of us will operate. In my example, the parent who encourages their child to go burn down a shed or car or house of a neighbour is committing a crime. Their are encouraging and promoting reckless and life-endangering actions on their part of their kids, They are teaching them to ignore the safety of others and threaten their security and person. No one that I know would contend that that is a good child-rearing strategy and no one that I know would contend that this is acceptable.

While we can debate the boundaries of this and we would all understand that the situation is mediated by a variety of considerations, we would also all understand that the parent bears some level of legal responsibility. It is not that one person is legally responsible for another's action. This responsibility  is mediated (and, we likely need to discuss what that means so a future blog).

This discussion has taken us pretty far from where I began -- which was with a consideration of the oddities of "tough love" -- but I've done so for a reason. I wanted to indicate that the decisions parents make with regard to child rearing are not absolute rights. They are bounded by law and they have legal responsibilities. Child rearing is different from other rights (which we might treat as more or less absolute) because it involves two levels of human relations: that is, unlike the TV show I choose to watch, decisions with regard to child rearing involve necessarily the lives of others (the child and the folks who might have to live with the effects of your or my child rearing strategies). These people have their own rights and so the actions one takes cannot just be explained away as a "that is my right as a parent."

Here is the key point to which I wanted to get. I am not arguing that every parent is responsible for everything their child ever does. I'll address the limits of this in my next blog. But, I am arguing that parents are and should be treated as responsible adults. If there are reasonably foreseeable effects of the decisions they make, they are responsible for those effects. If you teach a child to hate and they end up hating ... you bear some responsibility for that. If you teach your child that violence against women is OK, and they are violent against women, you bear some responsibility for that. If you teach your child to disregard, say, property rights and burn down your neighbour's house ... you bear some responsibility for that.

Why? Because the actions that you took had reasonably foreseeable consequences. Yes, the person who burned the house is responsible for their own actions. They caused the fire and endangered the lives of others. But, the person who taught them that that was OK is also responsible for their actions. They created a situation where their child was a manifest danger to their neighbours and they cannot wash their hands, I am arguing, of that reality and must take responsibility for their own actions.

There is a lot more than can and should be said about this. I am not trying to create some sort of situation where criminals blame their parents as if this got them out of their own responsibility.  It does not. I am, however, trying to highlight an important and often neglected element of child rearing: the actions of parents have consequences to other people. Let's not pretend that they don't.