Testing your theory

Thank you. You have explained it all very clearly. There is a satisfying purity and logic to your views. I consider myself a parental sovereigntist simply because I believe that when a child is definitely deficient in knowledge or understanding to make a wise decision, it should be the parents and not the state who decides for him. As I am at least much closer than most people to you in my views on this, I hope you will forgive the differences in opinion and indulge me with further clarification on how you feel about the difficulties I see as likely to arise in families not as lucky as yours in the harmony between parents and children. Unlike you, I don't feel that parents should have the power to forbid their children things they are old enough to decide themselves. So, for example, if my son of 14 or 40 were to want to have an affair I thought was bad for him, I would think it my duty to advise or plead with him not to go ahead, but I would think it unfair to use more than heavy persuasion to stop him (though fair if he were say 10). Mostly this comes down to a belief in individual freedom, but that difference in principle is not what I think it interesting to discuss. It will be easiest if I present a hypothetical story for your comment. Supposing you had had a 6-year-old daughter who had been much more difficult with you than you have actually experienced. Let us imagine that one day she got into a huge sulk over being told what to do, went to her room and slammed the door. When she didn't appear for lunch, you went to see and found she had disappeared, leaving a note saying she had gone to live with a lady she had met in the street and bought her an ice-cream and was nicer than you. Next, a few hours too late, when you showed a photo of her to the station-master at your local railway station, he said he had seen her boarding a train with a woman in dark glasses. What would you do? Presumably you wouldn't want or even tolerate help from the police, and in your ideal society they would be forbidden to help if you admitted your daughter had left of her own volition. I fear that short of excellent luck with a private detective, it is likely you would never have seen your daughter again. I admit this is an extreme story, but extremes are necessary to test the soundness of theories and it is at least possible. Unfortunately, there are some genuinely nasty people out there. I expect you've heard of the likes of Ian Brady. If little children could be abducted with impunity provided the child said "Yes", I fear many more of them would act. This leads to my main point. A generation or two ago, children were far freer than today to do things like roam around the countryside without adult supervision and I believe they had much better childhoods as a result. All that has changed largely due to the paranoia generated by pedophobia and underlined by real cases like Brady's. If your principles were to be accepted by society, it would have to get much worse, as even people like me who have tried desperately to allow their children an old-fashioned freedom, would not dare let their children go off for adventures on their own. Don't you feel at all that that would be something to regret? www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112