Parent State

This is going to be the beginning of a multi-part post regarding the disintegration of the power of parents in society, what I term "passive" dealings with children, and how they do more harm than good.

There are two societies we are forced to consider. The one that governs its interactions with children passively and the one that governs its interactions with children actively. The passive society governs with a divestment of personal responsibility but not the point of inflicting physical neglect. The basic needs of the child are met but not by the primary caregiver, rather, the community of experts and society at large step in to fill that role. This practice of Parens Patriae was preached, infamously, by sociologist Arthur W. Calhoun in A Social History of the American Family--a critical corpus that students have been drawing lessons from for the last century:

"The new view is that the higher and more obligatory relation is to society rather than to the family; the family goes back to the age of savagery while the state belongs to the age of civilization. The modern individual is a world citizen, served by the world, and home interests can no longer be supreme."

The society he praised is also that advanced by Engels and Marx in the Communist Manifesto, where the family is abolished and the state assumes its essential functions. It is one that could be considered passive because of its shared divested interest, in that it remains a collectively active in caring for children, but on an individual level--the level for which a child is going to be aware and relating with--is a more passive and uninvolved authority. In this way, individuals for which the child is in developmental proximity with can neglect them but still maintain that the child's care is satisfactory provided for on a social level. The society assumes responsibility for the parenting, for which the child can't relate or feel obligated or responsible to, and the parents and other individuals for which the child can naturally relate to divest their personal responsibility to some other invisible entity or device.

Children can not feel responsible to a ghost, a non-physical entity--an idea or conception--whether they be a network of professionals, experts, or state employees working in unison for their support, any more than an idea can be responsible for a child, which IS an entity, a dynamic being. No child under the custody of a state, or sitting in a doctor's office, relates themselves as socialized and attached to this abstract notion of the "State," as such a thing is a non-entity, a conception. It is made up of networked social structures and organizations that have no contact with the child directly but can assume the very direct task of parenthood.

This is the essence of the passive society. A child under the custody of the state, for instance, or in the supervision of an expert, relates themselves socially to their immediate caregivers--who only serve as a representative face for the abstract notion of the state, the corporation, or the daycare, and it is these individuals--the direct caregivers---that the child is natively wired to model, to learn and socialize themselves. This is that natural instinct of childhood, and yet these caregivers don't assume this direct role. They do not participate or feel obligated to take a participatory role in modeling behavior, because that responsibility belongs to the invisible organization or the state.

Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that since the direct caregivers, for which children are wired to respond to, can not have personal responsibility on an individual level for the children they are assigned to, that neither should the child feel responsible for him or herself and for society to which they are assigned. This is what makes the passive society passive, and ultimately ineffective in nurturing positive development in children. Thus the individual children it raises can not be effective in nurturing the positive development of a responsible society in return.

Obviously our society is not a completely passive one, as Engels and Marx may have desired, and the demonstration of this extreme was only intended to provoke the reader's imagination as to why we shouldn't be allowing passivity to overtake action when it comes to raising children. It is true though, that our society has many passive institutions within it--the Medical Industrial Complex, for example, whereby parental regard and discretion is disengaged by the push to diagnose and intervene in the behavior of children only so far as the transgressions can be medicated, not reinforced. Parents surrender their right to parent by dropping their children a pill.

Other passive institutions are the existence of youth curfews, where society relegates the behavior of children to bedroom confinement for their own protection or the supposed good of society. The existence of child leashes, satellite locating devices, and any device that promises to regulate children's behavior by relieving the parent of their often difficult parental duties are all passive practices that are in common use. A child who dangles on the end of a leash is being forcefully controlled, and the parent has no part in enforcing the control other than the light action of holding the strap. In this, behaviors are not being reinforced by the parent, rather, they are being reinforced by the parent surrogate--the harness! And as such, the parent takes a passive role in the raising of their child.