The practice of raising and educating children, at a moment of seismic social, economic, and political change, has been elevated to new levels of public scrutiny. Political pundits, media personalities, op-ed columnists, school boards, parent-interest groups, and even legislatures have been consumed by debates that (on the surface) concern best pedagogical and parenting practice. Questions concerning pronoun usage, racism, sex realism, the concept of gender, ability, identity, and (systemic) oppression have all but enveloped Canada’s political landscape.
“Parental rights,” the umbrella term for these debates, has become a fixture of Canadian politics. It guides outrage, contours political wills, and mobilizes constituencies, driving votes and energizing media. For example, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre dedicated a substantial portion of his campaign to the issue, pushing back against progressive initiatives from the Liberals and NDP, which he described as opposed to the agency of the family and detrimental to the proper development of children.
With its newfound attention, “parental rights” has begun activating constituencies across Canada. Its advocates slap the moniker onto a broad and ever-growing collection of issues, and continually employ its language to stymie progressive action in family and child-related politics, siphoning the air out of progressive debates and shifting the terms so as to marvel at the horror of what they perceive to be an increasingly fragile and precarious family unit. Those advocates strongly imply that this precarity is the direct result of progressive change and civil rights.
But what are the parental rights being undermined? Are they unique to today’s political landscape? Or are they simply the latest iteration of an ongoing and much older discussion?
This backgrounder examines the historical expression of parental rights and the loosely defined “parental rights movement,” focusing on its functions, actions, goals, and outputs across various points in history. It identifies strands of this varied and decentralized narrative and movement’s roots (chiefly in the U.S. and Britain), connecting their intentions, rhetoric, and proposals to the continuation (and maintenance) of systems of oppression, repression, and control.
Here, we explore how the movement has become manifest, how it has evolved (including in its chosen scapegoats), and how it has persisted through the decades (yes, decades). In addition, we examine the breadth of the “parental rights” apparatus, including how and when this framing has become politically relevant, how it communicates and mobilizes, and what it has accomplished in the past.
What is the “parental rights movement?”
With the COVID-19 pandemic came an unprecedented mainstreaming and normalization of conspiracy-esque and reactionary political agendas. Among the most widely accessible narratives undergirding this shift is that of “parental rights,” which became an easily accessible rallying point for a range of policymakers and community groups intent on strengthening the reserve and powers of parents and the family unit. Of course, by “parents” and “family unit,” it is important to note that those employing these narrative signifiers are not interested in all families or all parents; rather, these signifiers should be explicitly read as referring to those of the (most usually) white parents who happily belong to the rigid construct of the nuclear family.
The “parental rights” movement has been deeply influential. In their 2024 impact report, Moms for Liberty (MFL), one of America’s preeminent parental rights organizations, claims that “Moms for Liberty state legislative committees worked to pass dozens of bills across the country.” MFL claims it helped get 32 bills signed into law, kill seven pieces of legislation it deemed dangerous, and boasts three regulatory wins across the United States. As of April 2023, “more than 494 bills have been introduced in 47 states to restrict access to medical resources needed for youth transition or to compel schools to out trans children,” both key demands of the parental rights movement.
In Canada, we’ve witnessed the proliferation and championing of parental rights nationwide, as well, whether it be Bill 137 (The Education (Parents’ Bill of Rights) Amendment Act) in Saskatchewan, the Higgs government’s reversal of Policy 713 in New Brunswick, former leader of the Manitoba Progressive-Conservatives championing parental rights as a key platform in her bid for premier, Ontario premier Doug Ford supporting the parental rights movement, and former Minister of Education, Ontario MPP Lecce, promising to strengthen parental rights in the 2023 school year. Federally, some of the backlash generated by the federal Bill C-273 (which sought to end corporal punishment of children) stemmed from the parental rights movement.
“Parental rights,” then, has made quite a dent in the American and Canadian political psyche, wielding considerable influence in mainstream politics, schools (for example the selection of education or reading materials), community groups, city councils and school board elections and more. But what are the “parental rights” in question? What do these rights entail, what does it mean to strengthen these rights, and how does it impact children?
The parental rights movement and narrative framing are not a new nor coherent phenomenon. Rather, notions of “parental rights” are part of a long tradition of regressive political action stretching back to the late 1800s.
Various appeals to “parental rights” throughout history can be mapped onto major social and political transformations, such as civil rights and child worker protections. Opponents of proposed progressive change have historically invoked the parent-child relationship as a counterweight. These opponents label change as a threat that seeks to disrupt or undermine the family’s ability to govern ‘their’ child and raise them with the beliefs and practices parents wish to instill. To then invoke parental rights is to retrench existing hierarchies and systems of power by side-stepping equality-focused initiatives and reframing them as issues limiting the authority of parents.
The concept of ‘parental rights’ is hence, by design, malleable. New and attention-grabbing bits of news, culture, and information have the capacity to wholesale turn into politics, loosely connecting them to the broad and disparate activity of this movement or narrative constellation. But to understand this movement and its dominant narratives, it is prudent to examine its roots, to see how, where, and when parent rights have become useful, and for whom. Here, we analyze several key moments in history where the potential establishment of progressive legislation, civil rights, and worker protections was hampered by the invocation of parents’ rights.
Specifically, it is worth examining the way parental rights served as an organizing principle in the development of British education systems, from the late 1880s through to the 1970s. Looking to the US, parental rights appeared again in proximity to progressive changes regarding labour and equality-focused initiatives between the 1920s and the 1980s, specifically as it concerns child labour regulation.
British education
In his work The ‘Third Wave’: Education and the Ideology of Parentocracy, Brown (1990) contends that the developments of British education can be understood in distinct waves, at a time Brown theorized the ushering in of new third wave.
The first wave of educational reforms saw the rise of mass schooling for the working class—“the minimum requirements perceived to be necessary in order for the labouring poor to fulfil their future roles in a changing society.” The second wave shifted away from a model of social predestination to one focused on merit, here reflecting egalitarian and meritocratic principles, which right-wingers saw as the instantiation of a “socialist notion of social justice.” The third wave, occurring during economic recession in the 1970s, stood as a reaction to the second wave, viewing the culmination of egalitarian merit-based schooling and economic ruin as causally linked. This third wave, then, functioned to reflect the wealth and preferences of the parents, who suffered under the regime of the second wave.
While the first wave was marked by inequality and continued socio-economic stratification, it also institutionally universalized (elementary) education. Although guided by the principle of social predestination, this wave sought to incorporate everyone, cutting across various social and economic differentiations such as ethnicity, religion, and class, folding (almost) everyone into a larger educational system—allowing, if only marginally, for the potential of social and/or class mobility.
The mass integration of the working class into the educational system supported and reinforced the rapid pace of industrialization, forming a key pathway to participation as well as ‘equal’ citizenship. Universal and mandatory elementary education was, however, met with resistance; parents “didn’t want to be told how to parent, nor have their children’s wages denied,” according to Lawrence Stone’s 1969 work Literacy and Education in England 1640-1900.
“it can hardly be a matter of surprise that, when three children in a family above eight years old can double the weekly income of the house, parents should withdraw the children from school”.
This was especially the case since there was no evidence that literacy did anything whatever to improve the prospects of the rural labourer. Social and economic advancement did not appear to be – and in fact was not related to educational achievement at the elementary level.
Education restructured the traditional pathways of socialization (the transmission of values, ideas of what values were, and which were important, notions of morality, and structures of discipline) that once rested with the family, moving metrics of socialization and economic participation outside of the scope of the household. Control could no longer be singularly mediated via the discretion of the parents or family unit.
Parental discomfort with education was amplified by politicians who claimed their constituents did not wish for education to extend further—although they rarely consulted them. In reality, these concerns more accurately reflected politicians’ worries about cost and “‘Prussian’ forms of state compulsion.”
Crucially, these anxieties about universal education mirrored the anxieties of the cotton textile industry, “who relied to an unusual degree on adolescent labour.” Here, the parent-child relationship became a useful political tool in the fight against progress (understood as potential support for and the betterment of the plight of the worker and their community), mobilizing the public as “parents” —an imagined coherent and homogenized bloc. Through this framing, the benefits offered by universal and mandatory education were pitted directly against the interests of the family.
Private industrial interests backed this opposition to education. Extended education threatened the available labour pool, as well as the very character of workers. In fact, English farmers in 1861, a group particularly hostile to education, cited that “education led to ‘a restless character’ among their labourers.” They positioned mass education as subjecting the family and industry to economic and social instability, changing the nature of traditional social relations and impacting income and the power of the family unit. Elite politicians, who had a vested interest in limiting the reach of education due to their class position, incessantly echoed these claims.
The role of the parent and strength of the family were of central importance. Children going to elementary school, which did not yet appear to positively correlate with actual material or social mobility, was nonetheless positioned as a threat to the power, productivity, and future of the family. As children spent more time outside of the confines of the household, the once absolute influence of the parents waned.
Another important aspect of parents rights mobilization during this first wave of educational reforms was in relation to religious teachings.
A group called the “Parents’ League” was formed in Lancaster in opposition to the so-called “intolerant” education bill. The group, a local coalition whose size and capacity are not clear, were in favour of parents rights, and objected to the notion of government control over the teaching of religious doctrine to their children, which they believed infringed on the liberty of the parent. While this complaint was not unique to the Parents’ League, their articulation spoke to a growing set of issues in England that parts of the public shared.
Government control of religious doctrine, these opponents said, meant the state could mandate “nebulous Nonconformist views” and forbid the teaching of Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, which funded and maintained schools for many years—all without any say from the parent-class. If schools had control over religious doctrine, they said, parents would lose significant influence over the child’s upbringing. Here, religious freedom was wed to parental sovereignty, each deeply entwined with a larger project of maintaining the sanctity of the family unit.
Prior to government intervention (through the universalization of education), the parents exercised total authority over the child, dictating values, morals, and the religion that the child would receive. As education moved outside the home (in part due to demands of industry), the influence of the parent lessened. Parents were obliged to share with the government, through public education, the responsibility to impart values to children.
The expansion of schooling also meant that poor and working-class children were able to ‘invade’ spaces traditionally occupied by those of a upper class position. This shift in the nature school, from elite to mass culture, stoked fears of eroding respect for authority. What would become of the existing labour pool if labourers were to think of themselves as mobile and not trapped in their role?
The second wave (during the post-WWII period) sought to build on the first —redressing the organizing principles of education, moving toward a focus on aptitude and ability, promoting a vision in which education could be wielded as a tool for justice and mass participation. The Education Act, in this spirit, was passed in 1944. This act aimed to “remove inequalities” in the education system of England and Wales, affording “equal opportunities for children of all backgrounds.” In Scotland, a similar act followed in 1945.
The new system, called a “dual selective system,” perserved crucial divisions. Existing grammar schools, intended for academically inclined students were maintained; however, in addition to these ‘upper-class’ institutions, a new “secondary modern school” was introduced—itself, more elementary in its curricula—meant for students who were not academically oriented. Additionally, a third type of school was introduced, the technical school, which intended to serve students with “superior technical interests.” Few of these schools actually came into existence.
Under this system, students’ test scores determined who would attend the two types of schools, based on tests administered at age 11. The placement could also be influenced by grammar school availability, as well as the input of teachers and parents.
The 1960s saw another shift, which did away with the dual selective system and to a model of comprehensive education, encompassing a soft-selective, multi-purpose framework for education, geared more toward middle-class students. Its implementation was suggestive rather than mandatory, leaving the door open to the purposeful and uneven development of schools. Still, comprehensive education assumed an egalitarian posturing, encouraging class mobility—or at least conjuring its possibility in the minds of the British masses.
The second wave saw schooling expanded to incorporate those with the misfortune of being born in a lower class, reorienting education to embrace merit and access over class and competition. While the expansion of comprehensive education through the 1960s and 1970s improved education standards, this did little to significantly improve the life chances of the British working class.
The promise of transformation had, in a revolutionary capacity, failed. Meritocratic and egalitarian reforms simply reiterated existing class structures but had become more accessible to the masses. Common education struggled to meaningfully embrace true equality and perpetuated social stratification, all while failing to meet the needs of industry.
Right-wing British conservatives voiced their concerns about the future of the nation and mobilized others in support of this cause—namely parents. In their dramatic recapitulation, parents were no longer merely parents; they were key players in the struggle for European civilization and against socialist influence.
The inability of parents to exercise their will, to choose which schools their child would attend, to move them as they saw fit, and to dictate what they would (and could) learn undermined the free-market principles and individual liberty the country defined itself by. If the parent was unable to perform their role as rational economic actors, barred from acting out fantasies of supply and demand, then what would become of future generations—indeed, the future of the nation itself? It was this frustration, stoked by the conservative Right, which then bore the third wave—a reactionary wave.
Opposing the progress and policies of the second wave, the British right organized against comprehensive education, working to maintain class division (that is, enforcing class discipline) and champion free-market principles. These groups were “explicitly and ideologically anti-egalitarian.”
This Conservative coalition targeted middle-class parents dissatisfied with the system of comprehensive education, taking advantage of their anxieties and mobilizing them against progress. In opposition to the progressive reforms of the second wave, this coalition pushed for privatization, “school-choice,” and opt-out proposals, all of which advocated for a return to organization based on class and social predestination.
United States equality initiatives
The U.S. saw a similar foregrounding of the parent-child relationship as a means of stymying and reversing progress, retrenching traditional systems of power. This strategy is evident in successful opposition campaigns against the U.S. government to regulate and/or ban the practice of child labour.
In 1916, the U.S. congress passed the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, giving it the power to regulate child labour. This law, the first of its kind, moved to ban the production of any article or commodity of any mine/quarry in the U.S. in which “children under the age of 16 years have been employed or permitted to work,” ban the sale of any article or commodity in “any mill, cannery, workshop, factory, or manufacturing establishment” which employ(ed) children under 14; and, strictly regulate the working hours of “children between the ages of 14 years and 16 years.”
While passing Congress with overwhelming support, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) later ruled the law unconstitutional. In the court’s opinion, this law “exceed[ed] the commerce power of Congress and invad[ed] the powers reserved to the States.”
A second legislative attempt was passed “as part of the Revenue Act of 1919 (also called the Child Labor Tax Law).” This bill, unlike the Keating-Owen Act, targeted child labour indirectly, instead using “the government’s power to levy taxes.” Unfortunately, this too was ruled unconstitutional by SCOTUS in “Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company 259 U.S. 20 (1922),” on similar grounds to the Keating-Owen Act decision.
The third attempt, the Child Labor Amendment (CLA), was submitted to the states by Congress in 1924 and would have modified the U.S. constitution to allow the federal government to ban the process of child labour. The Constitutional amendment would grant Congress powers to “limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age” as well as move the power to regulate foreign and interstate commerce within scope of Congress.
While it was approved by the house of representatives in April 1924, and submitted to the Senate in June, the amendment never met the three-fourths threshold for ratification. The issue of child labour was left in limbo until the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938, which barred oppressive child labor.
What was behind a decade of pushback against greater worker and child labour protections? Opposition was whipped up by deep-pocketed industrialists worried that labour reform would threaten their bottom-line, affording the state far too great a power to regulate industry profits.
One figure in particular stands out in this campaign. David Clark, a key figure in the initial defeats of child labour protection, was a virulent white supremacist who frequently railed against integration, worker protections, and bemoaned the plight of industrialists as the publisher of the influential textile-based industrial trade journal, the Southern Textile Bulletin (STB). The mill engineer, turned cotton mill owner, turned textile journalist, used his publishing platform to oppose all forms of child labour legislation, calling them “un-Christian.” W. J. Cash, an American journalist, recounts Clark’s opposition, writing:
“it represented “class legislation” and so set brother against brother, because it violated the Biblical right of the parent to absolute command of the child, and because it was an effort to do by “coercive action” what had better be left to be worked out in God’s own good time through the instrumentality of the mill-owners themselves; and that it represented unconscionable “meddling” with the individual’s sacred right to do what he pleased with his own—“a cruel indignity” to both the mill master and his workman, an “oppression” which would quickly spread from the mills to the farm, the beginning of the end of all individual liberty, and an opening wedge for Socialism, a Godless European invention which, as everyone knew, was already engulfing Yankeedom.” (224-5)
Child labour regulation, in Clark’s accounting, presented a direct affront to God, undermining the enactment of His will. To regulate, limit, or, to do away with child labour, in any capacity, would be to meddle with a heavenly-sanctioned order of liberty, to be exercised by the individual. The invasion of big government into the business of industry would then stand to undermining the instrumentality of the parent and the mill owner, as they exist to channel and enact the will of the Christian God.
Clark masterminded several strategies to block the implementation of federal child labour regulation and protection, using his trade journal as a platform. He claimed child labour legislation would not only hurt the profits of southern industrialists, and their mills, but it would “undermine the longtime advantage [the south] had enjoyed over New England competitors, whose child labor laws were comparatively strict and regularly enforced.” Child labour legislation became a proto-culture war issue, representative of the unwelcome imposition of Northern interests, of the “long-haired men and short-haired women” onto the good people of the South. It was a strategy for recruiting people to a cause they knew little about, setting them against their own best interests.
Later, Clark formed the ‘Executive Committee of Southern Cotton Manufactures’ (ECSCM), a group composed entirely of white wealthy mill industrialists, to prevent child labour regulation from taking effect. However, child labour regulation, specifically the Keatings-Owen Act, proved to be a popular position. Unwilling to give up, Clark recruited from “two prominent law firms” and identified sympathetic federal judges to orchestrate a constitutional challenge.
He selected and paid the legal expenses of a mill employee’s father, whose son was set to “lose his job” as a result of the incoming legislation. The father complained that the Keatings-Owen act would deprive him of “his children’s earnings,” and so the judge “enjoined the government from enforcing the law, setting the case on a fast track to Supreme Court review,” which eventually ruled, in a five-to-four decision, to kill the law.
Despite Clark’s victory, later that year the House Labor Committee “reported favourably” on the Child Labor Tax Act. Clark wrote that this new legislation was a ‘camouflaged’ version of the Keatings-Owen Act. Again, Clark returned to SCOTUS to issue another challenge. While the ruling took significantly longer to render, the court did eventually rule in his favour, again striking down the Child Labor Tax Act.
The introduction of the Child Labor Amendment (CLA) to the constitution riled Clark, who insisted it was an invasion of the government into the family farm, “preventing rural children from helping with the chores.” With the ratification of this amendment, Congress would be given the power to regulate the ongoings of the home, creeping into the private sphere and interrupting the command of the parents, instituting a sort of “idleness by law” among children.
Clark “founded and financed a group called the Farmers’ States Rights League” which flooded newspapers with advertisements denouncing the CLA “designed to elicit a visceral reaction among farmers.” He insisted the CLA would prevent children from working on their parents farms, or in their homes, that the south would be swarming with inspectors, and that this latest push for child labour regulation could be traced back to “the hand of Russian bolshevism” with calls for the amendment “originating in Moscow,” digging up statements from the Young Communist Internationale to substantiate his claim.
Clark claimed that CLA-induced “idleness,” which would inhibit “proper development” and the maturity pathway for children. Unable to toil, these children would not be able to improve their character through work, and so families and farmers would bear the brunt of the amendment. If a child could not toil, who would help around the house? Who would help around the farm? What would become of the family?
The campaign against the CLA was not limited to southern states. It mobilized anti-child labour organizations and networks across the country intent on maintaining the sanctity of the nation, the rule of law, and safeguarding the family. Even the American Bar Association and Nicholas Butler, then-president of Columbia university contended that the American public should not support this “disastrous attack upon our constitutional system under the guise of social reform.” The CLA is here representative of a larger campaign to enormously extend the reach of the federal government, allowing it to dictate what “might be called work in the home or on the farm.”
By imposing regulations on child labour, the government is, in this purposefully narrowed conception, restricting access to income, and so, security. Here, ‘the government,’ in attacking industry by imposing an unwanted and seemingly unnecessary school system, is undoing a system of family wages that allows low-income families to survive through the contributions of low-paid, low-skilled, young children, without forwarding an alternative. The capital-obsessed Right stoke these anxieties further, not only suggesting this natural system of labour is to be threatened, but also implying that its threatening will yield destruction for the members of the family, the security of the family, the domicile of the family, and the country.
What’s old is new again
Today, ‘parental rights’ have returned as an issue of national importance, presented as a new and unique phenomenon affecting young Canadians across the country. Students are supposedly being subjected to the tyranny of pronouns, critical race theory, gender, and radical (often ‘anti-Canada’) ideology through the continued impositions of the public educational systems. Instead of learning the real pillars of education, the basics (regarded as math, science(s), reading, and writing), attention is being diverted to superfluous “soft skills” which are not immediately relevant to industry.
Here, parental rights are mobilized to provide ground for attacks against public schools, strengthening calls for an ‘independent education for all’ so as to set children back on the optimal development pathway, to prepare them for lifelong toil in service of the market, without the messy context of social class or inequality or the climate crisis (for example). The appeal to parental rights should be understood as an explicit call for the rights of industry, of small government, and of God. The notion of a robust, universal, comprehensive, and publicly accessible educational system threatens to undermine the dominance of long-existing centres of control. Little wonder, then, why public education has always been targeted by those in positions of power.
