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https://homeschoolersanonymous.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/why-i-blame-homeschooling-not-just-my-parents-reflections-by-nicholas-ducote/

"Wolf"
November 26, 2014 7:58 am


Thank you for this comment, Christa. As a child who was very intelligent–very sentient at a very young age–I remember quite clearly how many times and in how many ways my rights were ignored or thoroughly trampled on, for no other reason than that I was a child. Society needs to begin looking at children, not as property of the parents, but as the “property” of themselves–and of the future.

They no more belong to their parents than a car belongs to the assembly line that makes it (not the greatest analogy, but it’s what comes to mind) and if the assemblers install broken components, that car will crash and burn, possibly taking the lives of a number of people.

My emotions were trampled on, considered irrelevant from day one–and still, as a teenager. My opinions “belonged” to my mother, and anything contrary to her doctrine brought immediate and unrelenting reprisals. It was a long struggle to create my own independent self, no longer dictated to by the mother-voice in my head.

Good parenting that results in a strong, resilient, independent adult takes a certain amount of setting aside of the adult ego–the desire for a child to be a perfect being, everything the parent dreams of. I still suffer from my fathers desire that I be “the best.” A surgeon, he thought; or an artist; or a writer. All professions that, in his dreams, would bring not only success, but renown. He wanted me to be “big” in life … but I do not want to live a large life. A small life is safer and more durable, because it matches my nature. My daughter? She will have her own dreams. Her failures are all hers–which means that her successes also belong entirely to her.

**(In this case, a good Jagadguru devotee -- Corboy)

When I had my daughter, even from the beginning I started to see that her emotions, no matter how “small” or “irrational,” were valid, always. She was not to be dismissed as a malfunctioning possession of mine. She was a person, feeling fear or sadness or joy or contentment, and I had to treat her the best that I could in order to GIVE HER LIFE TO HER. Her life did, and always will be, hers.

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"The incongruity between parents' rights and established principles regarding the nature and inherent limitations of individual rights compels us to seek other moral and/or legal principles to support and legitimize this anomalous set of rights. Absent such justification, we might be forced to conclude that parents' rights, like the plenary rights of husbands over their wives in an earlier age, ultimately rest on nothing more than the ability of the politically more powerful class of persons to enshrine in the law their domination of a politically less powerful class, and on an outmoded view that members of the subordinated group are not persons in their own right."


•James G. Dwyer, Parents Religion and Children's Welfare: Debunking the Doctrine of Parents' Rights, 82 California L. Rev. 1371 (1994).