One theory of the parental role is that parents are troublesome barriers getting in the way of a more fundamental relationship, that between the State and children. This is the theory of State ownership of children. Like the theory of parental ownership, this theory sees children as subject to ownership rights. However, instead of parents this theory posits the State as the rightful owner.
According to this theory, parents are subversive to the political authority of the State and this is seen as a problem. Parents cannot be trusted to inculcate loyalty to the state and therefore the State must take steps to separate children from parental influence. Advocates of the theory also believe that the State owns the adult citizens that the children will become, but they see childhood as the key stage in which this ownership right must be indoctrinated.
The idea that the State is the rightful owner of children goes back to antiquity. Plato’s Republic famously advocated for the abolition of the family and its replacement with communal, class-based child-rearing for the good of the State. In The Laws, Plato claimed that children “belong to the state first and their parents second.” in Politica, Aristotle claimed that children “all belong to the state.” He criticized Athenian education because "every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best." The legislator "must mold to his will the frames of newly-born children".
Rousseau openly advocated the idea that the State owns its citizens from childhood. In Discourse on Political Economy he wrote:
From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live; and, as at the instant of birth we partake of the rights of citizenship, that instant ought to be the beginning of the exercise of our duty. If there are laws for the age of maturity, there ought to be laws for infancy, teaching obedience to others: and as the reason of each man is not left to be the sole arbiter of his duties, government ought the less indiscriminately to abandon to the intelligence and prejudices of fathers the education of their children, as that education is of still greater importance to the State than to the fathers: for, according to the course of nature, the death of the father often deprives him of the final fruits of education; but his country sooner or later perceives its effects. Families dissolve but the State remains.
The French Revolutionaries were highly influenced by Rousseau, including in regard to the idea that the State owns children. Danton claimed “The time has come to establish the principle that children belong to the Republic before they belong to their parents".
Given how Hegel exalted the State and saw individuals as subservient to it, it is not surprising that he also advocated State ownership of children. For Hegel, the purpose of education was “to break down the child’s self-will” and, like Rousseau before him, he believed that “society’s right here is paramount over the arbitrary and contingent preferences of parents.”
The Progressive movement in the US, highly influenced by Hegelian ideas, was another group advocating State ownership of children. American progressive Jenkin Lloyd Jones argued that all children were children of the state: "The state is but the coordinated parentage of childhood, yielding to the inexorable logic of civilization that will compel co-partnership, co-operation, corporate life and conscience."
Most sociology, as it developed in the twentieth century, took this view implicitly or explicitly. In Moral Education, Durkheim argued that the collective (epitomised by the State) is an independent organism and source of all moral and intellectual substance. He argued that the State would eventually take the place of the family:
The center of gravity of moral life, formerly in the family, tends increasingly to shift away from it. The family is now becoming an agency secondary to the state.
More recent Statist philosophers Brighouse & Swift deny any limits on State interference in the family, arguing that "adults have no fundamental right to parent their own biological children". In Family Values they make it clear that they see their role as intellectuals to be one of providing advice the State in its exercise of power over the family:
The state decides what parents should be free to do to, with, and for their children; indeed, it sometimes decides who should be permitted to become parents in the first place. We set out a theory that aims to guide the state in its deliberations