Kids & Books & Parents

1. None of the rights guaranteed in the US Constitution is absolute or unlimited.
2. With every right comes responsibility

"Conservatives" demand the freedom while ignoring the work required to achieve and maintain that freedom.

So who's the fuckin' moocher now?

Opinion
The parents’ rights movement keeps ducking parental responsibilities

The current “parental rights” movement has a dirty little secret: It depicts parents as victims of teachers and librarians. Yet many of the movement’s proposed solutions fob off parental responsibilities onto those public servants.

Listen to enough debates about what books belong in public and school libraries, or about sex education, and a theme emerges: Even as they demand more rights, advocates of book bans and curriculum-dodging appear to wish they could do less parenting.

Take the group of Alaska parents who recently asked their local library to remove books “which are intended to indoctrinate children in LGBTQ+ ideologies” from the children’s section, or put them on a restricted shelf. “Parents who do not wish for their children to stumble across … confusing ideas,” they complained, can’t let their kids browse without close supervision.

Or take this move. Texas state Rep. Jared Patterson introduced a bill requiring vendors who want to sell books in Texas to rate their offerings as “sexually explicit” or “sexually relevant,” based on whether the books are “patently offensive,” “pervasively vulgar,” “obscene” or “educationally unsuitable.” Apparently, it’s not enough for parents to keep an eye on what their children are checking out. Instead, librarians must read the minds of every adult in town, anticipate what each one might find objectionable and pre-censor their shelves accordingly.

Such proposals actually give publishers, librarians and school administrators more power to make moral judgments on behalf of parents, not less.

Instead, parents should explain to their kids what they’re forbidden to check out and why. And let their kids’ librarians know. When she was a school librarian, says Andrea Jamison, Illinois State University College of Education professor, she would enforce parents’ rules. But she insisted they explain their reasoning to their children themselves. Stepping in to impart those values on their behalf would usurp parents’ rights.

In dodging these conversations, parents are also transferring their anxiety about how their children are growing up onto teachers and librarians.

It can’t be that young people express authentic interest in gender, sexuality or current events — or even that they crave junky thrillers and bathroom humor. It must be nefarious librarians pushing guides to puberty such as “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health,” and trash classics such as V.C. Andrews’s “Flowers in the Attic.” As Texas state Rep. Gina Hinojosa put it in March with an air of resignation, “I wish they would pick up Shakespeare.” But it’s Captain Underpants and the Fart Quest series that got her son into books.

And it couldn’t be that kids are naturally curious about racism or climate change. Instead, it’s teachers and librarians who are scattering dangerous ideas through their shelves like so many intellectual improvised explosive devices.

In reality it is the very books adults are trying to protect students from that they find most vital. That’s what kids tell Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who runs the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “Students experience violence, they experience racism, they experience poverty,” agrees Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a former middle school English teacher. “If you’re old enough to experience these things, you’re old enough to read about these things.”

More ducking of parental duty shows up in the furor around sex education and other curriculums. Many school districts require parents to actively opt out their children from lessons that run counter to their values. Instead, some parents want to require that families opt in.

These advocates suggest that children shouldn’t be exposed to the social consequences of feeling singled out. For instance, at a 2022 hearing on a proposed sex-ed curriculum, Daniel Gallic, who chairs the Warren Township, N.J., planning board, complained: “An opt-out of the program makes the children subject to harassment and intimidation.” In 2017, a Palo Alto, Calif., parent protested her daughter hadn’t felt comfortable filling a form to skip a sex-ed class because “she would have been the only student in the class to do so and didn’t want to feel left out.”

Certainly, schools should protect students from bullying or discrimination based on their beliefs. But giving middle and high school students practice at explaining their family’s values seems like a form of education everyone should get behind.

“We do not want to raise snowflakes who are not able to take the realities of the real world,” was how Talarico put it in a March 21 Texas House committee hearing on Patterson’s books bill, flipping conservative rhetoric on its head. “We want to prepare our kids, especially our teens in high school, for what they’re going to face when they’re outside our school laws.”

That preparation takes work. Parents who want to assert their rights ought to be ready to take on their responsibilities.