It was the best of times: Tracing the roots of the “parental rights” movement

I have always been a fan of how historical narratives evolve, and how they influence current contexts. And, often, how that history is then erased from present day conversations.

I am also a fan of Dr. Paul Fairie at the University of Calgary. Dr. Fairie started posting threads on social media of current and historical newspaper headlines commenting on behavioural issues and trends—”Kids today are rude.” “Workers today are lazy.” School is just too easy.” “Schools should get back to the basics.” Turns out that people in positions of power love to crap all over young people, students, women, schools, and workers pretty consistently…and have done so for…well, forever.

It’s a very clever, show-don’t-tell way to illustrate that, in spite of the alarmist headlines, the elite are strikingly UNoriginal when it comes to their beefs about those they seek to instruct, manage or control. Apparently, when compared to some vaguely defined idyllic past, workers have always been lazy, kids have always been rude, and schools have always fallen short when it comes to preparing students for life and work.

So why do these same complaints keep making headlines, over and over, decade after decade, in any number of media outlets? And further, why are the memories of those who were once (and are perhaps still) the targets of these same criticisms so short when it comes to the next generation of headline victims?

Everything old is new again

Those with power have always marginalized, mocked or oppressed people who a) reveal or reject the mechanisms maintaining those structures of dominance or b) challenge or constrain that authority. We know this.

Power structures and those benefiting from them have shown incredible resilience and relentlessness in continuing to assert their dominance—changing tactics and finding new scapegoats where necessary. But the true target is consistent: it’s always social progress. And the framing is consistent too: anything that serves to contain or limit or even reveal those structures is evidence of “government overreach.” Paper straws, vaccines, fluoride in drinking water, all-gender washrooms, walkable communities (or even the much maligned ‘15 minute cities’)—all of these are reconfigured not as health, accessibility or climate measures, as options or even alternatives, but as symbols or evidence of government control. (Side note: at a recent protest I was approached by a bystander who offered me a bumper sticker for theylied.ca. ‘Who’s they?’ I asked. ‘The Government,’ he replied. ‘What’d they lie about?’ He paused, looked around, then leaned in, conspiratorially. ‘Everything.’)

To some degree, growing suspicion of government motives is not an entirely illogical response. Decades of public disillusionment with a system that was sold as being better for everyone—a meritocracy!—combined with the repeated drumbeat of “doing more with less” as budgets continue to shrink has left neighbours fighting each other over scarce resources to ensure their children have a leg up on the competition (read: the kid next door). This disillusionment and desperation at what neoliberalism has wrought creates an audience receptive to those intent on painting government programs as “useless” at best, and as overbearing and controlling at worst.

And right on schedule, we have another round of “breaking” news. Masculinity (and femininity, for that matter) is being “erased.” Parents are being terrorized by rude kids. Kids are too soft: witness their sunscreen and bike helmets. (Not like when we were young and played in traffic and drank from garden hoses and were apparently perpetually concussed.)

This “back in my day” generational finger-wagging (yes, even with Gen X and Millennials) goes beyond Facebook memes and takes on added significance in the current manifestation of the “parental rights” narrative.

Safety, surveillance and schooling

The appeal to a parent’s anxiety about what unknown or unfamiliar forces might be influencing or even endangering their kids isn’t new. In the early 70s, George Gerbner termed this “Mean World Syndrome”—the sense that the world was getting more dangerous (all evidence to the contrary), due in large part to sensationalist reporting and TV shows. Anyone else remember the ominous nightly “It’s 10:00—do you know where your children are?” warnings on television?

Suggesting their child’s safety is at risk (whether immediate or theoretical) has always been a very effective strategy for mobilizing parents against a particular target (from music to movies), to increase support for certain policies or priorities (like enhanced police budgets) or to purchase various products to keep us safe (often of the surveillance nature, like cell phones or home security cameras so even when your kids are home you can make sure they’re actually home).

But it turns out that, rather than simply helping parents keep tabs on their kids, technology inflames a whole host of existing fears and creates new ones. With the post-pandemic lockdown solidifying the role of technology in our daily lives, parental anxiety now transcends distance and curfews and closed bedroom doors.

Your kid might be on the couch in the next room, but they could be talking to anyone, at any time. They could be influenced by things beyond your control. By curriculum or school staff or books in the library. By people who believe in things you don’t, or who eat foods you can’t pronounce.

And what’s worse, you might not even know it—until it’s “too late” and your kid is choosing hummus over hotdogs and starts researching settler-colonialism for a paper and refers to a friend as “they” and you find a Planned Parenthood brochure in their backpack. Appealing to parents has required the weaponization of the “other” fear factor: you entrust your kids for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months of the year (give or take) to an institution filled with other adults and other kids you don’t know. What are they learning? And from who? And what the hell has the school been teaching them and why weren’t you informed (ironically, at a time when parents have ever more contact with their children’s schools through email, applications, teacher websites, and classroom platforms)—after all, this is your kid, not the school’s and not the government’s, and what about your rights as a parent?

Obviously I’m exaggerating for emphasis. I’m certainly not ignoring—no one should—the proliferation of far right influencers on social media platforms. And I’m not dismissing cyber bullying or online predators, those digital and networked versions of the strangers that our parents or grandparents warned us to not talk to or take candy from.

I’m also not minimizing the need for ongoing and enhanced communication channels within school communities—something made all the more challenging by the takeover or shuttering of school boards in several provinces and the sidelining of democratically elected trustees in a patently transparent power grab.

The act of parenting obviously brings with it a heightened sense of responsibility, a duty of care, and the constant push/pull of wanting to protect your kids from pain and hardship and the dangers that lurk around the next corner while simultaneously wanting them to learn to stand on their own two feet, recover from the challenges life throws at them, and to somehow develop that ever-elusive “work ethic.” It is precisely these loaded feelings that are being capitalized on and weaponized—the sense that powerful forces seek to control and manipulate our children, transforming them into something unfamiliar, unrecognizable, and potentially even dangerous; perhaps even leading them to reject their parents altogether.

But in spite of the “save our kids” or “hands off our kids” slogans, the parental rights movement isn’t actually about protecting children. It isn’t about alleviating the sources of parental anxiety about their child’s future, and it’s certainly not about examining to what extent parental self-worth and personal success is so wrapped up in how we perceive our kids, or how we think our kids are perceived by the outside world. How often have we heard (perhaps even said) that kids are the products of how they were “raised”—the “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” or, alternatively, that kids are tiny ambassadors for their parents.

This is because despite its framing, the movement isn’t parent-driven, it’s parent-targeted and championed by astroturf parent groups as part of the strategy to camouflage its market-driven roots. The reason for this camouflage is a simple and very effective peer to peer marketing strategy. Because when it comes to day-to-day concerns, the bread and butter issues about what kids need and what families want, CEOs aren’t going to be trusted the way “regular” parents are.

Not surprisingly, the parental rights movement—and those seeking to court and benefit from it—has fixated on public schools. But this is a continuation of a long tradition of the elites criticizing what public schools will do and won’t do, all of which is in perpetual opposition to the demands of the marketplace and the requirements of a ‘decent’ (and a comfortably familiar hierarchical) society.

However specious in theory the project might be of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor it would, in effect, be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments to which their rank in society had destined them; instead of teaching them the virtue of subordination, it would render them factious and refractory, as is evident in the manufacturing counties; it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books and publications against Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors; and, in a few years, the result would be that the legislature would find it necessary to direct the strong arm of power towards them and to furnish the executive magistrates with more vigorous powers than are now in force.—British Tory MP Davies Giddy, 1807

We shouldn’t be surprised. Like unionization, mandatory schooling has always been an obstacle to the unfettered demands of the market, in large part because (even ignoring the content) it requires children to be in school rather than in the workforce.

Parental rights^TM

But making the case for child labour over child learning requires a special kind of PR—a sideways rather than a frontal attack, an appeal to “work ethic” and “morality” and “natural order” and “behaviour.”

Dr. Fairie has curated decades of headlines making these allegations about public education: it’s too easy, it doesn’t focus enough on the “basics,” it makes kids rude (insolent!) and it encourages too much reading (vicious books!). It may even necessitate more policing to quell an uprising brought about by too much learning, too much awareness, too much (dare I say) wokeness.

Fairie challenges the notion that we have outgrown previous moral panics. But it’s a lesson that bears repeating, particularly in the current policy and narrative context where the tropes of parental rights and protecting kids are once again being used to obscure a much more self-interested lobby.

The Economic Policy Institute has documented how child labour legislation has been rolled back in a number of American states, and child labour violations are increasing: ‘Attempts to weaken state-level child labor standards are part of a coordinated campaign backed by industry groups intent on eventually diluting federal standards that cover the whole country.’ Apparently, kids have been choosing to complete high school and even seek additional education, accumulating an enhanced skill set. One would assume this would be recognized as a positive trend—not one that should be reversed.

But what’s intriguing is the way proponents framed this legislative rollback as a family-rights issue, not a big business lobby initiative. In Arkansas, when Senator Sarah Huckabee Sanders repealed the “Youth Permitting Act” loosening restrictions on child labour, it was lauded by “regular family guy” Nick Stehle, of the Foundation for Government Accountability: “the main push for this reform didn’t come from big business. It came from families like mine, who want more of the freedom that lets our children flourish. We are not a state that values perpetual adolescence and government control. We are a state that thinks families know best and work leads to better lives.”

The Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank founded in 2011, has been instrumental in drafting state legislation to expand the legality of teenage labour by rolling back aspects of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (which established a federal minimum wage, a 44 hour work week, and established the legal age of work at 16 years). But they’ve deliberately and explicitly framed this as a parental rights issue—not a big business or even an economic one. Significantly, their 2022 white paper was titled How states can streamline the hiring process for teenage workers and restore decision-making to parents [emphasis added]. The first key ‘finding’? “Parents, not schools, should have decision-making power over whether their children get a job.”

The paper is punctuated with phrases like “schools should not replace parents” and “some pro-work states already recognize the importance of allowing teenagers to join the workforce and respect parents’ decision-making rights.”

This is not about keeping kids safe. It’s a corporate-led strategy, positioning public school in direct opposition to parents, to families, to child development, and even to national productivity…with the intention of rolling back child labour laws.

And here we come full circle, because using parental fear to undermine and vilify schools is not a new strategy at all. Whether it’s media barons or CEOs or just ‘reg’lar folk’ posing as parents (and forget about their corporate credentials), schools and those who work in them are routinely and perpetually blamed for making kids soft, rude to authority figures (their “betters”), and undermining that elusive work ethic on which our national survival depends.

Regardless of the homemade signs, the “everyday moms and dads” tone, there’s nothing grassroots about this corporate-driven astroturf campaign. Its claims of being parent-led and “all about kids” stand in stark contrast to the actual impact — less protection, less safety, fewer options, and ultimately less public funding. And of course the ramifications go far beyond “their” kids—ultimately, this is about all of us.

Canada is not immune, as we have seen, to the parental rights drumbeat and how it’s being utilized by decisionmakers, right-wing media pundits and conservative activist groups with their own agenda and for their own purposes, some of which are decidedly un- or even anti-democratic. We need to pay attention to why so many people are susceptible to this narrative, and why others are prepared to cede ground or cater to it.

And while we must protect those who are being scapegoated and sacrificed as collateral damage in the drive to undermine our public schools, we must also (and perhaps even more importantly) always remember who and what is pulling the strings behind the parental rights curtain—and to what end.