More Schools Playing the Parental Role, But Not for the Good of Students
In recent years, parents have witnessed a growing fierceness in the battle over parental rights, especially as regards their children’s education in public schools. Parents must remember that their love for their children is an expertise all its own – and their love outshines every false claim that would imitate or coopt it.
They see little of this unconditional love reflected in the actions of public school officials who increasingly claim to stand in for them – not as aides and supporters, but as replacement parents. Parents are now much more aware of disturbing trends in public schools, where so-called experts are attacking and undermining their right to protect their children by coopting and distorting a crucial legal notion: in loco parentis.
That legal Latin phrase, more than 500 years old, simply means “in place of the parent.” Every sensible person knows that parents are best suited to make decisions for the good of their children. When someone other than mom or dad has to do that on the parents’ behalf, they stand in loco parentis – temporary substitutes, not replacements. Mothers and fathers have natural affection for their kids and intimate knowledge of their character. This closeness ensures that parents make decisions in their children’s best interest. Schools merely act in place of parents, teaching kids what mothers or fathers would wish to teach them but could not do independently.
This loving parental authority is what too many public institutions, and especially public schools, have been looking to pervert or erase. Their attitude has shifted from “we serve the parents” to “foolish parents lack our expertise.” Yet the phrase, in loco parentis, implies that parents are the natural choice for making decisions for their children’s welfare. Parents are the exemplars of proper care for a child. Public officials today ignore actual parents’ judgment and claim to have equivalent (or better) judgment. Claiming sham expertise in “social justice,” willful teachers, educational bureaucrats, and government officials have tried to replace the power of parental love with PowerPoint presentations on gender fluidity.
When teachers or officials at public schools encourage students to lie to their parents and encourage government agencies to remove a child from loving parents if the parents do not affirm the child’s desires regarding a so-called gender transition, that’s not in loco parentis – it’s just loco. No claim to faux expertise will justify such madness.
Parents need to remind educators about the truth of in loco parentis and apply its reasoning to settings beyond the classroom as well. Consider the shareholders and entertainers of Instagram or TikTok, who gain more than money by attempting to undermine the relationship between parent and child. When they entertain children in their parents’ absence, they implicitly stand in loco parentis, and yet they assume no responsibility for what is best for the child. They answer to advertisers, shareholders, or even foreign dictators. Far from seeking the child’s good, they merely gain the loyalty of the child to keep clicking, often to his detriment. It’s an abduction of children’s hearts while their bodies remain safely in their parents’ homes. It’s neither “social” nor “just” to any boy or girl under such influence.
But an awakening has begun. Organized groups like Moms for Liberty, Moms for America, and parents around the country are starting to see that too few teachers and influencers in their sons’ and daughters’ lives are acting properly in the place of, and on behalf of, loving parents – and for the good of their children. American parents are reasserting their authority.
Like Truman Burbank in “The Truman Show,” parents are beginning to notice that too many of those who instruct and influence their kids have very different goals than their family’s good. Parents are the primary educators, and their native love for their children overrules the cruelty of our careless age.
