Parents can and do abuse their authority over their children. Children have rights and should not be aggressed against, neglected, or denied the care and support from parents that they have a legitimate claim to. However, those who argue for children's rights do not always have the interests of the children in mind. Sometimes the advocacy of children's rights is a vehicle for promoting the interests of political authority.
As discussed in previous posts, one school of thought in philosophy of the family holds that the State is the rightful owner of children and that parents are a barrier to State power.
Those who see parents as a barrier to State power seek strategies to separate parents from children. One example is to advocate for communal child rearing. A related strategy is to seek ways to weaken parental authority.
In What's Wrong With Children's Rights, Martin Guggenheim identified two distinct goals within the children's rights movement of the 1960s:
Broadly speaking, the children’s rights movement since the 1960s has focused on two sometimes intertwined but often completely separate matters. One concerns the rights of children with respect to the exercise of state power; the other, the rights of children with respect to the exercise of parental authority.
Guggenheim argues that the goal of reducing state power over children was rapidly sidelined. Instead, reducing parental authority over children became the dominant goal. A key group driving the movement was lawyers involved in the emerging field of children's rights law. Guggenheim was himself a children's rights lawyer and he laments the fact that the movement came to focus almost exclusively on the reduction of parental authority as opposed to the reduction of state power.
In Parental Rights the Contemporary Assault on Traditional Liberties, Krason and D'Agostino argue that children's rights advocates use the existence of abuse as a pretext to justify the State taking authority over children instead of parents:
Some of the most influential advocates of children’s rights begin with observations that some parents are not protecting their children. Then they use instances of child abuse to justify a general transfer of authority from the parents to social workers and lawyers.
As an example, they cite Cohen's argument in Equal Rights for Children that the existence of child abuse justifies restructuring of all relationships between parents and children:
we must be ready to accept the idea that dealing with child abuse will mean changing the structures of all relationships between adults and children—not merely the bad ones. If we can not say in advance which adults are likely to abuse children and which are not, then we can not reduce child abuse by treating parental problems case by case. We would be too late—and probably do too little as well. To treat the problem seriously, then, we would have to find a way to build checks against child abuse into all our relationships with children.
This opposition to parental authority is characteristic of all Statists who see parents as a barrier to political authority. From the early Progressive movement, parents were seen as a problem that children need to be liberated from. In The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued for recognition of children's rights as a way for the State to gain more influence over them and the parents less:
There is no more brilliant hope on earth today, than this new thought about the child .… the recognition of 'the child,' children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal ownership—the unchecked tyranny, or as unchecked indulgence, of the private home.
Many intellectuals have made the argument that only people approved by political authority ought to have the right to parent children, and that unapproved should never be left with parental authority. This is set out as a policy goal of licensing of parents, or restricting of parenting to only those approved by the State. One of the anthropologist Margaret Mead's proposals was that children be taken from natural parents and assigned to couples specially trained and certified for parenthood. This idea was also advocated by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970) and by the academic Hugh LaFollette in his 1980 paper Licencing Parents. LaFollette argued that if any unlicensed parents have unapproved children then the State should "remove the children and put them up for adoption.”