I am a parent but not a lawyer so what I write is a combination of what I believe and what I think U.S. law supports but since I'm not a lawyer, I could be wrong about that.
There is also some fuzziness in the word "right". It could refer to what is ethical and also to what is legal.
jenisautistic wrote:
Okay now that all that rantings done I want to have a coherent and thoughtful question Now here's my question what are children's rights and how do we raise our children without making them biased?
How indeed? What we parents actually do is attempt to pass on our own preferred biases to our children. Our preferred biases are our values. It is neither possible nor desirable to raise our children without at least attempting to pass these on. Then there are the biases we hold but wish we didn't and those we try to keep from our children and not pass on. But I don't think it's possible to raise a child in a completely unbiased environment. The children are free to reject these values when they are adults. The very fact that I think children are free to do that as adults is in fact one of my own biases and not universally held. Many people believe that casting away the values and biases of your parents is both familial and cultural betrayal.
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Do children have the right to property and their own lifestyle opinions and identity that is appropriate to their age?
This is actually 3 things:
property rights: children do have limited property rights as far as I know, but they are subordinate to the parents' property rights of their own home. A parent is allowed to say "I don't want X in my home" and that is their right. Can the child retain ownership by moving the object to another home (a sympathetic relative, perhaps) even if they are ordered to destroy it? I honestly don't know the law. I think ethically the child should be able to keep the item if they can find somewhere else to store it, such as a sympathetic relative. This actually does come up a lot when relatives don't have shared values. An uncle will give his nephew a gift that the parent doesn't approve of and the parent says "not in my house" and the child says "uncle X gave it to me o it's my property". This is usually resolved by keeping the gift at Uncle X's house nd the child using it there but I don't know the law.
lifestyle opinions :children have the right to think whatever they want and that's all an opinion is- a thought. Saying this thought out loud to the parents is another matter. The result will be a yelling argument between child and parent. I don't think any law addresses these arguments nor should it.
identity: the child has the right to their own identity but parents do have some control about how that is expressed in terms of room decoration or clothes. I don't know where the law is exactly on this. It may have come up with gender identity. I didn't google.
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If a parent give the child money or maybe the child earned it themselves or got it from a friend or relative do they have the right to control what they spend it on even if it's age-appropriate and not bad?
If the parent gave the child money for a specific purpose, it really should be spent for that purpose. My parents used to give me money for school clothes and it really was my responsibility to spend it on clothes I could wear to school, not party dresses or records (we had records back then). If the money was a gift with no specified purpose (such as for college, a common gift given to teens by relatives), then the child should be able to spend it on what they want so long as it doesn't conflict with parental rights (silly example; buying a statue for the front lawn that the parent doesn't want on the front lawn, or buying black apint to paint their bedroom against parental wishes).
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Do they have the right to force their opinions and beliefs on their children?
It depends on what you mean by force. They certainly have the right to share these opinions and beliefs but it gets a lot fuzzier with the most forceful thing which is choice of school. Parents have a legal right to send their children to whichever accredited school they choose. Ethically I don't think they should send a child to a school in strong conflict with the child's beliefs or identity but legally they have the right to do so. I just don't think it's a good parenting decision. But in some cases it really is a good decision. In some school districts, the Catholic schools really are academically the best. It's a case by case thing.
21 Dec 2013, 10:58 am
also I was thinking about being a parent and how I will raise my kids when I have children.
