parents are the only hope of freedom

Parentage cannot possibly be a matter of "chance". We are all the product of our parents. You wouldn't be you or anything resembling you if you had had different parents. ...the slavery of boys, so hardly anything we can support. Your argument seems to imply that parents seek only to oppress their sons, while the state is only interested in letting them do what they want. Actually, though there is no iron-cast rule, the reverse is far nearer the case. It is fundamental to the nature of all animal life that parents are deeply concerned that their children should survive and flourish. Amongst humans, this usually manifests itself in an abiding love that has the happiness of the children at its core. The state has entirely different concerns. Besides the manifest self-interest of those who drive it in doing only what will serve their own careers, its interest in children is primarily in how to develop them to serve the interests of society as a whole. I want my children to be happy and feel fulfilled because I love them. If they are, I don't much care if they serve the interests of society or not, because I don't love society or have any responsibility for it. I am a parental sovereigntist like Goethe. I think I understand just how he feels, though if I have understood him correctly, I wouldn't go quite as far. Though I believe passionately in freedom for children, I see the state as having an unavoidable role, not in imposing its own wishes, but in determining when the child can assert his own will over that of the parents. I don't believe a three-year old can often be in a position to decide whether he should brush his teeth, or accept an offer from a friendly stranger to drink champagne, have sex or go bungee-jumping. Making him take a wise and well-informed decision when he is still ignorant is exactly what parents (not the state) are for. But if his parents are to be allowed to make these decisions for him, even against his will, there has to be somebody (and who besides the law?) to determine the age at which the child can assert himself against his parents. Parental sovereigntists are not oppressors, as you seem to assume. I, for example, think my 14-year-old should legally be allowed to make his own decisions on all the afore-mentioned things against my advice and my will, which is more than almost any state allows. Regarding my 11-year-old, however, while utterly rejecting the morality of the state interfering, I think I should be able to exercise a veto. The fly in the parental sovereignty ointment, of course, is that many or most parents will not agree with you that the age of speech is the age of consent True, but some of them will, which is a great improvement on the present situation where the nanny state never respects the child's wish to consent. In imagining a parental-sovereigntist society, it matters only a little how the average parent today would respond to the purely hypothetical question of whether he thinks it would be okay for his son to have sex. What is really important is how he would really exercise his power to forbid or demand punishment. Nuance and his love for his son would be almost bound to come into play. What if his son came and told him he was in love, insisted his lover had done him only good and it would break his heart if he went to prison? Remember that in the society we are imagining, it would be entirely up to the parents what line to take and they would know they bore full responsibility for the effect on their child. Would all parents refuse to listen? I don't think so. The state always refuses to listen to the consenting child because it does not love him. www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112