TO WHOM DO
CHILDREN
BELONG?
C
HILDREN BELONG TO ________________! How
did you complete this statement? Over the past few
decades how people would complete this statement has
undergone radical change. This should come as no surprise
since our country has become more secular with each pass-
ing day. Today, many adults believe that children belong to
the state or the community and not to parents.
Here is some evidence of how today’s society views
our children:
“Some children are raised in such an ideological prison that
they willingly become their own jailers … forbidding them-
selves any contact with the liberating ideas that might well
change their minds. Parents don’t literally own their children
the way slave owners once owned slaves, but are, rather, their
stewards and guardians and ought to be held accountable by
outsiders for their guardianship, which does imply that outsid-
ers have the right to interfere.” Daniel Dennett
“How much do we regard children as being the property of
parents? It’s one thing to say people should be free to believe
whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their
beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for
society stepping in?” Richard Dawkins
8
By Dr. Glen Schultz
“Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given license to
enculturate their children in whatever ways they person-
ally choose; no right to limit the horizons of their children’s
knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and
superstition or to insist they follow the straight and narrow
paths of their own belief.” Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey
“We have never invested as much in public education as
we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private
notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your respon-
sibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are
our children. So part of it is we have to break through our
kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids
belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to
whole communities. Once it’s everyone’s responsibility and not
just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”
News Anchor Melissa Harris-Perry (MSNBC promo)
This idea that children belong to the “village” is not new.
This is clear from an old African proverb that states, “It takes
a village to raise a child.” Whenever a society believes it owns
the children, it then declares that it has the right and the
responsibility to educate children in whatever way society
thinks is best.