What Conservatives Mean When They Talk About Protecting Children

It's not about human rights. It's about property rights.

If you take the global right at their word, which I am not prone to doing, they are motivated by the desire to protect their children from the many threats of the great world. These threats come in the form of brown people, drag queens, and Pokemon cards.

Although I am being glib, the drive to protect “the child” is the justification for some of the worst right wing backlashes of our time. The child is sometimes hypothetical or metaphorical, a (usually white) image conjured up as a potential victim, a stand-in for every concerned parent’s precious baby. For example, trans people are pushed out of sports, bathrooms, and public life altogether not because there is evidence of systemic danger to children but because of the perceived threat towards a little girl that is usually imaginary, a synecdoche.

Sometimes, the child in question is real, a tragedy weaponized by the broader right wing. For example, the murder of Laken Riley is being used to justify heinous crackdowns on immigrants across the United States. Although Laken was a grown woman at the time of her murder, she is often spoken of as “someone’s child.” Her mother has become one of the most prominent figureheads of anti-immigrant laws in the United States, speaking in the name of her child. The public is encouraged to imagine immigrants doing this to their child as a way of getting consent for mass violence against them.

Like the story of Laken Riley, most of the examples I will be using in this essay are US-centric, but because the United States is so culturally dominant, and so much of the funding of the global right wing flows from the United States, these patterns are often replicated in other parts of the world.

So much is being done to protect the child, but what does it actually mean to protect the child? What do conservatives mean by that? And why are we here? I am no expert, but this is a topic I keep seeing, so I wanted to write about it.

What Are We Protecting the Child From?

If we’re spending all this time changing the world and punishing people in order to protect the children, perhaps it’s a good idea to articulate what we are actually protecting the children from.

While most people would assume we are protecting children from violence, conservatives are actually alright with violence against children—as long as it comes from them. In a (sadly deleted) Substack series and subsequent book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, the journalist Talia Lavin details how extreme corporal punishment and child abuse is actually a core tenet of the Christian Right. Children growing up in these homes face unspeakable violence at the hands of their parents and older family members.

The controversial sex worker/blogger Aella recently released a post detailing her upbringing according to one of these books, Growing Kids God’s Way, which despite whatever you may think about her, is pretty horrific. Early in the piece, she says something that is pretty instructive: “This insularity was important - a big part of GKGW was making sure your kids didn’t have exposure to corrupting influences.” Aella writes how she was only allowed to spend time with other GKGW children and consume media that had no mention of children disrespecting adults.

This is what children are being protected from, external input and stimuli from the world. They are being sheltered from learning any information that is not directly transmitted by their parents and approved by their parents. That is why sex education is such a frequent flash point for those claiming to be “protecting their children.” They, as the parents, want to control information children have about sexuality to be able to control their expression and exploration of it. They, as the parents, want to control the information children have about their very bodies—see the frequent dust-ups about prepubescent children learning age-appropriate lessons about anatomy, secondary sex characteristics, and periods.

Children are being prevented from having thoughts, opinions, and interests that are not chosen by their parents. In short, when conservatives talk about protecting children, they want to protect children from free will.

It Is Not the Child We Are Protecting, but the Parent

The conservative’s conception of protecting children is not about protecting the child, but about protecting parents. The American conservative ideology supports giving parents exclusive leverage over what happens to their children—up to and including the child’s death. Countless children have died in the United States so that their parents can maintain their rights. Parents are allowed to refuse to vaccinate their kids, leading them to die from diseases that have been preventable longer than my parents have been alive, such as measles. Parents are allowed to refuse medical care for their children if it goes against their cult’s beliefs, for example “The Followers of Christ” in Idaho, whose infants have a nearly 4x higher mortality rate than that of other children.

The libertarian Jeremy Kauffman is fairly representative of this ideology. In May, as part of his thread of apparently ridiculous NPR stories that radicalized him against liberalism, he cited a story NPR ran encouraging 14 year olds to get vaccinated without parental consent and another story where they spoke about how 16 year olds should not get married even with parental consent. He was not making a statement about the validity of either of those things (although I can assume what he believes as a libertarian). It doesn’t matter that one of these (getting vaccinated against a deadly disease) is a net good for the child, but the other (child marriage) has been proven to be detrimental to minors.

The problem, to him, is the attitude that liberals have towards parental consent, namely, that it is not all-powerful and all-deciding. That children (although in this case, teenagers) are allowed to decide for themselves if something is good, and that the state can step in to stop parents from making decisions that harm their children, is problematic to the American right-winger.

Some conservatives are at least transparent about this. In the educational culture wars, most Republicans are shifting to the rhetoric of parental rights, explicitly cited by Donald Trump, rather than continuing to use the phrase children’s rights. While they still claim their goal is to be parent-defenders of children against threatening ideologies, at least the name has changed to be more reflective of reality. What is at stake is not the child’s right to learn, grow, or have a safe environment (that last thing in particular is too liberal). The conservatives are fighting for the parents’ rights to veto their child’s learning and dictate everything in their lives.

I am still surprised at how credible the mainstream commentariat is on this topic by accepting the claim that conservatives have valid concerns about protecting children, even though they transparently cite their own concerns as parents rather than their child’s safety. If someone claims they are for animal safety but advocates for puppy mills, we would not call them animal safety advocates. Why are children any different?

It’s Not About Children. It’s About Property.

When conservatives talk about protecting children, they are not talking about human rights or the rights of the child. They are talking about property rights, because in the conservative ideology, children are property of their parents.

This is hardly a new idea. Jonathan Montgomery published “Children As Property” in The Modern Law Review in 1988, where he talks about two theories of parental rights. While the first theory sees parents as having rights inasmuch as they serve to protect the children in their community, in the second they are absolute rulers. He calls the first parents “trustees on behalf of the children,” while in the second the children are treated as property.

While this article mostly focused on legal principles regarding the law when it interacts with minors and their parents, other authors have made the link between parental rights and property rights more explicit, especially within the context of the American Christian right wing. The writer Sarah Jones published an article in New York magazine in 2023 titled “Children Are Not Property” that is honestly so good I nearly deleted this draft because it already outlines the various facets of this ideology that only brings harm to children (I’m keeping on because I’ve spent months bookmarking tweets from these freaks that I want to put to some use).

The article goes into some detail about one aspect that I’ve seen understudied, which is that the same people often going into hysterics about learning about slavery in the classroom turn around and reduce child labor protections, for example Ron DeSantis in Florida. Jones argues that this is part of the conception of the child as property: the child is the parent’s object to dispose of at will, including to rent out for work.

However, I’d argue that the relationship is a bit more complex—especially since the children the most likely to be put to work in meat packing plants and night shifts are not the children of upper middle class white evangelicals, but those coming from poor, Black, Latino, and immigrant backgrounds. The drive to accumulate wealth and property is the backbone of capitalism (I’m not a very dedicated scholar of Marx, but this even I know). To reproduce itself, capitalism needs additional resources and objects, and children become the latest object thrown into the pit of Mammon to fuel it.

The illusion of property is also crucial to maintaining capitalism. The saying goes that every American is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, not a working class person. The dangling carrot of potentially owning property is held in front of every person, never mind that once you accumulate that property half of the time it is owned by the bank, not you. In this way, the dangle of parental ownership over the child is used to pass legislation that would actually ensure corporate ownership of the child. Sometimes, these movements say the quiet part out loud and explicitly use parental rights language to talk about rolling back child labor laws, such as this tweet from the official New Hampshire House Republicans that framed Democrat efforts to limit how late minors can work as “big government controlling your child’s bedtime.” Then, the focus becomes again on the parent, rather than the labor abuses that children are suffering at the hand of corporations.

In the right wing, besides being a source of labor, the child is property of the parent in all of its other characteristics. A child is not an individual, but something that belongs to the family, either as a possession or a trophy. As such, all of its characteristics must be in accordance with what the family picked out, like a purebred dog or an ottoman for the sitting room. That is why it would be preferable to have a dead child rather than one that had medical treatment the parent did not choose, to have no child rather than a queer or trans one.

Talking about protecting the children is an easy sleight of hand even for unrelated topics, such as firing the Librarian of Congress. It signals to your base that the person you are targeting is another deviant. It kneecaps any potential opposition because first you have to argue that you are not a danger to precious babies and then that what the right wing is doing is totally nuts. Plus it has the benefit of making whatever you are doing sound palatable to the majority of Americans who are mind-numbed numbskulls that do not follow the news and will just hear “protecting children,” go “oh nice,” and go on their way.

Meanwhile, the actual children are detained, deported, ripped from their families, ripped apart by heavy machinery at jobs they should not be doing, beaten, forced to become ill, and starved. Parents are separated from their children, incarcerated, impoverished, and overwhelmed. But that doesn’t matter, because the wrong kinds of parents do not matter, and the children do not matter at all.

For all the talk about “parents’ rights,” Right-wing parents do not want to be parents at all. They want to be masters.