This post fits into this discussion thread much better than the "General Discussion" section, where it was a follow up to an inadvertently posted response I made there a few days ago. I hope someone takes the trouble to read the arguments put forward carefully, and not just dismiss them, because I'd suggest they are of importance to anyone who has children, or grandchildren who might one day become estranged parents due to the way we're all treated under family law systems across the Western world, (apologies its quite long):
Pepper said:
All I meant was, @grahamg was Our children are not born with the job of loving us in return. Children aren't born with jobs.
This is an extract from the linked article above, (link repeated here again), shedding more light upon the suggestions being put forward concerning children, (do try to digest all this if you wish to continue to impugn Professor Akira Morita, and profess your understandable wishes for the best for all children everywhere):
https://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/08/abandoning-children-to-their-rights
"American society has long been committed to protecting and developing its children, as the existence of the nation’s public schools and juvenile courts demonstrates. The concept of minority legal status has also protected children from their own temporary lack of capacity. Rather than discriminating against children, this tradition gives them advantages designed to protect them from abuse and nurture them toward maturity.
Not until the early 1970s did the first Kiddie Libbers appear, arguing for the first time that children “are autonomous individuals, entitled to the same rights as adults.” This assertion relied not on new evidence that young people have adult-like capacity, but on the liberationist ideology that kids are people too. This ideology drew support from Supreme Court opinions in the 1960s that recognized rudimentary constitutional rights for public school students and other children.
But child autonomy claims have not really carried the day in American law. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell captured the collective judgment of American courts and legislatures in 1979 when he wrote that “the peculiar vulnerability of children, their inability to make critical decisions in an informed, mature manner, and the importance of the parental role in child rearing” together justify “the conclusion that the constitutional rights of children cannot be equated with those of adults.”
Break
"Among the fundamental axioms of American law is the doctrine that the parent-child relationship antedates the state just as natural individual rights antedate the state in the Constitution’s political theory. Parents are not trustees who receive authority to rear their children through delegations of state power over children. Rather, as the Supreme Court held in distinguishing biological parents from foster parents, the natural parent-child tie is “a relationship having origins entirely apart from the power of the State,” while a foster placement arranged by state agents “has its source in state law and contractual arrangements.” Because of this principle, the Court has said, “the child is not the mere creature of the State,” and the social structure-partly in order to limit state power-presupposes a system of family units, not just a mass of isolated individuals who all stand in the same relationship to the state.
Agents of the state in America have thus never had authority to intervene in the child-parent relationship until they establish jurisdiction through formal proceedings: divorce-related custody issues; adoptions; findings of serious parental unfitness, neglect, abuse, or abandonment; or child misbehavior severe enough to require state intervention."
"Article Nine of the CRC, however, provides that children may be separated from parents when “such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child.” Articles Three and Eighteen add that while “parents have the primary responsibility for the upbringing and development of the child,” the “best interests of the child will be [parents’] basic concern.”
Does this mean that any parental care that falls short of serving the child’s “best interests” is sufficiently flawed to trigger intervention? Could a child trigger state intervention merely by requesting state review of the “reasonableness” of parental conduct compared to the child’s view of his or her best interests?"
Break
"The CRC’s developmental language reflects perfectly desirable psychological aspirations that do not (and, like hopeful but unenforceable expressions of a child’s “right” to be loved, cannot) mirror legal reality."
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"But some adults who want to liberate children are not as motivated by children’s interests as by their own interests-some ideological and some that merely serve adult convenience. Adults face a conflict of interest in thinking about autonomy for children. When they disengage themselves from the arduous task of rearing and teaching children in the name of increasing children’s autonomy, adults’ actual-even if not fully conscious-purpose may be to increase their own autonomy by freeing themselves from the burdens of providing meaningful care. Even worse, some pro-child autonomy claims are merely a smokescreen intended to protect the interests of adults who profit from such claims while indirectly exploiting the actual interests of children.
In addition, a growing clamor over legal rights for children may create the illusion that parents, teachers, and other adults owe children only what the law demands of them. The increased appearance of autonomy for children becomes then essentially the default position that results from reducing our sense of adult responsibility for children. The assertion that untutored, unguided children already enjoy all the autonomy they need may relieve adults of demanding obligations, but that assertion is ultimately a profound form of child neglect. Children cannot raise themselves."
Another major concern with the autonomy-based approach of the CRC is its failure to distinguish between state paternalism and parental paternalism. By assuming a direct relationship between children and the state, the CRC could have the effect of reducing parental commitments to childrearing while concurrently increasing the dependency of children on the state. To the extent that governmental policies foster noncommittal attitudes on the part of parents, either because parents believe they have no right to give direction to their children or because they fear that in giving them direction they might meet state-supported resistance, both the children of those families and the larger society will suffer.
For most parents, the “rights” of parenthood leave them no alternative but an assumption of parental responsibility, because that responsibility, both by nature and by law, can be assumed by no one else until the parent has failed.
But when state-enforced policies undermine traditional parental rights, those same policies will inevitably undermine the assumption of parental responsibility. To undermine parental initiative is not wise when society has found no realistic alternative to it. Indeed, it may be that children have a right to policies that require parental accountability. Yet contemporary society reveals increasing adult indifference toward the nurturing of children. The CRC’s attitude only exacerbates this tendency.
There is great irony in the observation of Akira Morita, a Japanese legal scholar who has studied the CRC’s drafting process. Professor Morita found that after a decade of leisurely discussion, the CRC’s hastily composed 1988 draft-particularly its emphasis on child autonomy-resulted from “a hurried compilation of the then current discussions as heavily impacted by the growing momentum toward the end of the Cold War. In other words, the ‘civil rights and liberties of the child’ was a child of the ideological victory of the United States over the USSR.” In his view, the impending collapse of total state paternalism in the Soviet Union helped convince the drafters that they should accept the anti-paternalistic ideology of the CRC. The drafters thus significantly confused state paternalism with family paternalism, for the Western liberal tradition has long viewed strong familial authority as a primary check on excessive state power. Nonetheless, the anti-paternalistic flavor of the times helped lead the drafters “in the final phase of deliberations in Geneva” to “defeat an attempted resistance by the representative of West Germany who tried to defend the traditional paternalistic structure of child and family law in Western society.”
in short if you have a child who loves and respects you cherish every moment because the alternative is a living hell.
