Who Speaks for the Child?

I have an essay in the new issue of Commonweal in which I address the thorny issue of children's rights and push back against the prescriptions of scholars such as James Dwyer and Emily Buss while cautioning against a return to the archaic conception of the child as parental property.  It's only available by subscription, but here's an excerpt:

Ultimately, the tension created by the children’s rights movement is captured in a single question: Whom do we trust to care for the child?  Once the state assumes the authority to speak for a child, what happens if the parents fall into a category of people-for example, drug abusers, prisoners, the mentally incompetent-who tend not to act in a way that is most supportive of a child’s future autonomy?  Under Dwyer’s prescription, these parents would bear the burden of proving their worth before the state permitted them to act as parents. It is not difficult to imagine future calls to expand the category of those presumed to be unfit parents to include individuals who would threaten their child’s autonomy by passing on misogynist or homophobic religious beliefs. When parenthood exists as a creation of the state, the boundaries of state power become difficult to discern.

The state must tread lightly and cautiously whenever it seeks to enlarge its regulatory presence within the family, even when its motivation is noble and its aims laudatory. We cherish the family because it is the social foundation of human experience -- the community where the human person loves most deeply, sacrifices most nobly, and relates most authentically. It is much more than a mere training ground for the future exercise of autonomy, and its value is not readily captured in the language of public norms and legal rights. We would do well to recall the perspective of Catholic social teaching, as expressed in chapter 5 of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church: “The family,” it reminds us, “does not exist for society or the state, but society and the state exist for the family.”