Child Abuse: parental rights and the interests of the child

ABSTRACT I criticise the 'liberal'view of the proper relationship between the family and State, namely that, although the interests of the child should be paramount, parents are entitled to rights of both privacy and autonomy which should be abrogated only when the child suffers a specifiable harm. I argue that the right to bear children is not absolute, and that it only grounds a right to rear upon an objectionable proprietarian picture of the child as owned by its producer. If natural parents have any rights to rear they derive from duties to bring their children into rational maturity where they can exercise rights for themselves. The presumption that natural parents are best suited to rear their own children should be discounted, as should the assumption that alternatives to natural parenting are unacceptably bad. I reject the suggestion that parents should be 'licensed'but argue for a much closer monitoring of the family. Familial privacy, which such monitoring breaches, is shown to have a culturally specific and, given the facts of abuse, dubious value. In conclusion, I briefly specify the forms of monitoring I approve.     

The Intergenerational Association Between Parents’ Problem Gambling and Impulsivity-Hyperactivity/Inattention Behaviors in Children

Despite the well-established association between problem gambling and ADHD core categories of impulsivity-hyperactivity and inattention, the link between parents’ problem gambling and impulsivity-hyperactivity/inattention (IH/I) behaviors in children has not been investigated. This study investigated the association between parents’ problem gambling and children’s IH/I behaviors while controlling for potential confounding variables. A population-based prospective cohort followed-up from kindergarten to age 30, the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Kindergarten Children (QLSKC), provided data over three generations. Among 1358 participants at age 30, parents with a child aged 1 year or older (N = 468; Mean age = 4.65 years; SD = 2.70) were selected. Generalized Linear Models included measures of grandparents’ and parents’ problem gambling, parents’ IH/I behaviors in childhood, and a host of risk factors and comorbidities to predict IH/I in children. Intergenerational bivariate associations were observed between grandparents’ problem gambling, parents’ IH/I in childhood and problem gambling at age 30, and between parents’ IH/I, problem gambling, and children’s IH/I behaviors. Parents’ problem gambling predicted children’s IH/I behaviors above and beyond the effects of covariates such as family and socioeconomic characteristics, alcohol and drug use, depression symptoms and parents’ gambling involvement. Parents’ IH/I behaviors in childhood also predicted children’s IH/I and had a moderating, enhancing effect on parents’ problem gambling association with their offspring’s IH/I behaviors. Problem gambling is a characteristic of parents’ mental health that is distinctively associated with children’s IH/I behaviors, above and beyond parents’ own history of IH/I and of typically related addictive, psychopathological or socioeconomic risk factors and comorbidities.     

Descartes’ Morals

The Children's Act (Act No. 38 of 2005) and its associated regulations allow for virginity tests to be performed on male and female children over the age of 16. This is subject to a number of legislated conditions, including that informed consent should be obtained. In this article I argue that, whilst it is important that the right to social and cultural practice be protected in South Africa, virginity testing is a practice that cannot be morally justified. Firstly, I defend the claim that the practice is inherently unjust. At least some of those subjected to the tests will inevitably experience the undesirable consequences of a false test result. The practice is also discriminatory as it typically and unjustly targets girl children, since boys are far less commonly tested. I argue further that the practice perpetuates a harmful patriarchal social order. Finally, I contend that any attempts to justify this legislation are fatally flawed, because it is fundamentally irrational, since there is no reliable means of testing for virginity.     

The Morality of Daycare

An increasing number of parents are electing to use daycare to assist them with their parenting from infancy onward. Strikingly, there is scant discussion of whether or not such a practice is morally permissible. In this paper, I shall discuss three different arguments that I believe are implicitly thought to support the use of daycare. I shall argue that the current widespread use of daycare, particularly with respect to infant children, often involves arbitrarily subjugating the needs of children in favor of the desires of parents, and thus is often morally wrong. Finally, I consider a possible fourth argument; one that I believe stands a better chance of justifying the use of daycare, though in the final analysis I argue that it also fails to justify the current widespread use of daycare.     

The Possibility of a Fair Play Account of Legitimacy

The philosophical literature on state legitimacy has recently seen a significant conceptual revision. Several philosophers have argued that the state's right to rule is better characterized not as a claim right to obedience, but as a power right. There have been few attempts to show that traditional justifications for the claim right might also be used to justify a power right, and there have been no such attempts involving the principle of fair play, which is widely regarded as the most promising basis for a claim right to obedience. William Edmundson argues that the principle of fair play cannot generate power rights, and so any attempt at a fair play account of legitimacy must fail. I explain how fair play could generate a power right, owing to its stipulation that the rules of a cooperative scheme specify the form of participants' repayment. 1     

On Some Recent Attempts to Resolve the Debate between Internalists and Externalists

An important debate in moral philosophy concerns the thesis of internalism, of which the characteristic idea is that there is a conceptual link between moral judgment and motivation. According to the internalist, to judge that something is right is to be motivated to do it (at least under certain conditions). Externalists are those who deny the truth of internalism. There are two ways that either party to this debate may argue for their preferred position. The indirect approach requires defending an account of moral judgment and showing (for internalists) that it entails there is a conceptual link between moral judgment and motivation or (for externalists) that it entails there is no such link. In contrast, the direct approach requires arguing in favor of one position without assuming any particular account of moral judgment. In this paper, I examine two attempts—one by Michael Smith and one by Sigrún Svavarsdóttir—to resolve this debate between internalists and externalists by using the direct approach. Smith attempts to do so in favor of internalism while Svavarsdóttir makes the attempt in favor of externalism. I conclude that both attempts fail.     

Gratitude and parents' rights over their children's religious upbringing

Although most parents claim their children owe them obligations of gratitude, there has been no attempt to analyze gratitude as a basis for parental rights over children's religious upbringing. Parents' provision of benefits to their children in an altruistic fashion requires that children ought normally to honor parental requests that they participate in religious rituals and attend sectarian education. However, the limits on parental altruism and the self‐defeating nature of extreme demands for requital of gratitude suggest that gratitude is not a sufficiently strong basis to justify the rights of parents to prevent their children's exposure to religious beliefs inconsistent with their own. The state acts consistently with children's obligation of gratitude when it offers an education providing children the right to exit their religious communities, but not when it seeks to promote radical religious autonomy.     

The Right to Meaningful Education: The role of values and beliefs

This article argues that children have a right to education that assists them to find a meaning in life. The right of children to meaningful education is interpreted as a right to be raised within a coherent concept of the good and to learn about a variety of alternative conceptions. Both parents and teachers have duties that correspond with the two aspects of meaningful education. I argue that parents have a freedom to raise their children within the conception of the good they themselves hold, but that this freedom is restricted in two ways. Firstly, they have to give their children the freedom to explore alternative conceptions. Secondly, the conception of the good that they offer to their children has to be moral.     

I’ll Never Forgive You: High Conflict Divorce,Social Network,and Co-Parenting Conflicts

The relation between divorce, co-parenting conflicts, and children’s adjustment problems has been well established. An unresolved question for research and clinical interventions, however, is how conflicts between parents are maintained and/or escalate. This cross-sectional research tested the hypothesis that co-parenting conflicts in divorced couples are associated with perceived social network disapproval and that this relation is mediated by parents’ tendency to forgive each other. In Study 1, a convenience sample of 136 divorced parents recruited via online forums, we showed that perceived social network disapproval was indeed positively related to co-parenting conflicts and that parents’ tendency to forgive the other parent—albeit partly—explained this relationship. Strength of our research is that in Study 2, 110 parents referred to children’s mental health care because the wellbeing of the children was severely compromised by the severity of the conflicts between parents, we replicated these results. In both studies perceived social network disapproval and co-parenting conflicts were positively related and this link was mediated by forgiveness: perceived social network disapproval was negatively related to forgiveness, which in turn was negatively related to more parental conflicts.     

Family Therapy with East Indian Immigrant Parents Rearing Children in the United States: PARENTAL CONCERNS,THERAPEUTIC ISSUES,AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The paper focuses on East Indian immigrant parents and some of the post-immigration difficulties they experience in their attempts to rear culturally East Indian children within the United States cultural context. Concerns specific to parenting children in the US, and therapeutic issues East Indian immigrant parents bring to therapy are presented and discussed. Effective therapy with East Indian immigrant families requires that therapists be flexible in their therapeutic approaches with these families, and become more knowledgeable about the varieties of East Indian families, their cultural beliefs, values, and norms. Recommendations for culturally effective therapy are offered.David A. Baptiste, PhD, is Senior Psychologist, New Mexico Corrections Department, and in the private practice of Marital and Family Therapy, 2709 Sim Ave. Las Cruces, NM 88005 (DAB2709@aol.com).*The author is an immigrant from Guyana, South America, an Indian diaspora country. The experiences and observations discussed here are culled from 30 years of clinical practice in several US locations with a variety of East Indian Families from the Indian subcontinent and other diaspora countries.     

Defending the Common Life: National-Defence After Rodin

abstract   David Rodin has recently put forward a compelling but disturbing argument to the effect that the traditional justification in Just War Theory of a state's right to self-defence (what Rodin calls national-defence), which is derived from the legitimate case of personal self-defence, fails. He concludes that the only way to justify forceful responses to aggression against states by other states or non-state groups is by viewing the right to do so as falling under a form of law-enforcement, which in turn requires the existence of some overarching universal state. In this paper I argue that there exists a possible justification for national-defence that Rodin has overlooked due to an underlying commitment to what Charles Taylor calls 'the primacy of rights thesis'. My claim is that a particular family of views that see human identity as being crucially bound up with society offers the resources to avoid the pitfalls that Rodin points out befall other attempts to justify national-defence.     

Towards a Liberal Environment?

It is widely supposed that liberal political theory must exclude direct concern for nature, that its anthropocentric individualism can allow only indirect, instrumental value to the non-human world. This is perhaps thought to be especially true of contractarian versions of liberalism. In this paper I try to show that this is not so by outlining an argument based on an analogy between the 'neutrality' of Rawls' political liberalism and the 'otherness' of external nature. I consider some possible objections to the argument, and try to explain why I think that the analogy is strong enough to justify modifying the Rawlsian approach to encompass direct concern for external nature (as other). If I am right then it is not necessary completely to abandon that approach in order to construct a more adequately ecocentric political theory.     

Pastoral power in nurturing the spiritual life of the child

In this article, I will investigate the link between – what the French philosopher Michel Foucault calls – ‘pastoral power’ and the concept of ‘nurturing children’s spirituality.’ In the first step, I will explain the concept of pastoral power. In a second step, I will look to some literature about nurturing the spirituality of the child and the tips and tricks they give to nurturing the spirituality of the child. I will develop how power is present and how it can be abused easily. By nurturing the spirituality of their child, parents can control the life of the child. I will argue that it is important that everyone who works with children is aware of the hidden forms of power in nurturing the spirituality of the child in order to not misuse their power.     

Jesus in Hollywood The Cinematic Jesus in a Christological and Contemporary Perspective

This article discusses what early Christian literary sources (Didascalia, the Apostolic Constitutions and Canons and John Chrysostom) say about the upbringing of children. It centres around three aspects:(1) the responsibility of parents to rear children in accordance with Christian ideals, including the responsibility to carry out the upbringing in daily life, (2) its goal and (3) its substance and methods. To put the ideals of the Christian texts in their wider cultural context, the article gives a brief outline of relevant aspects of the upbringing of children in the Greco-Roman world. The Christian sources seem to emphasise even more than pagan authors the need for moral formation, which is the ultimate goal of the upbringing, and argue that, in the end, the parents’ salvation depends on taking this task seriously. The texts reflect the ideal that it is mainly the parents themselves, and not nurses or other servants, who should carry out the Christian formation. Controlling the social lives of children and and leading them into a comprehensive life of piety are seen as significant. The Christian texts argue for a more extensive use of corporal punishment than the classical ideal of the bonus paterfamilias indicated.     

Cognitive tempo in children and their parents.

An adoption study was conducted to determine if cognitive tempo (as characterized by errors and latencies on the Matching Familiar Figures Test) is more similar between parents and their biological children or between parents and their adopted children. Zero-order correlations between parents and children were not significant (regardless of familial relationship), but the results of canonical correlations for mean of parents' scores with those of biological and adopted children respectively were consonant with hypothesized values, suggesting a degree of heritability exists. A slight trend for parents' latency to be consistently related to their biological children's latency was noted, but no such trend was present for errors. The heritability of latency versus errors in cognitive tempo is discussed.     

Fatherhood and Child Support: Do Men Have a Right to Choose?

ABSTRACT My primary aim is to call into question an influential notion of paternal responsibility, namely, that fathers owe support to their children due to their causal responsibility for their existence. I argue that men who impregnate women unintentionally, and despite having taken preventative measures, do not owe child support to their children as a matter of justice; their children have no right against them for support. I argue for this on the basis of plausible principles of responsibility which have been used to defend abortion rights. I then consider the morally relevant differences between men and women, arguing that while in some cases these differences may justify differential treatment, their import should not be overstated — in many cases, the burden of child support will be too great to impose justly on fathers. This conclusion is not as undesirable as it may seem: I suggest feminist considerations in favour of revising the notion of paternal responsibility and consider alternative arrangements of child support.     

“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,a Long Way from Home”: Complex Adolescent Identity Formation in a Transcultural Adoption

During adolescence, concerns about identity come to the fore. Questions such as “Who am I?” and “Who am I in relation to other people?” present unusual difficulty for the adopted child, who must navigate the complex developmental task of including two sets of parents (and possibly several cultures) within his representational world. Adopted children must also integrate the knowledge that they were born to one set of parents but are being raised by another. When the child's physical characteristics are different from the adoptive parents, this further complicates identity issues. Even when children have developed a safe and secure attachment to the adoptive parents, knowing that they were born into this world by a mother who then gave them away can evoke feelings of being utterly alone, bereft, and unloved. When adopted children enter adolescence, these feelings can loom large and powerful, derailing the development of their sense of identity. Presented here is the case of an adolescent in a transracial adoption in which the boy left his adoptive mother's home in a cataclysmic crisis, feeling alone and motherless, to run to his adoptive father, who suffered from major depression. The mother, too, felt bereft, and the therapist initially felt unable to help.     

What does it mean to ‘live’ and ‘die’? A cross‐linguistic analysis of parent–child conversations in English and Indonesian

Previous work on children's intuitive knowledge about the natural world has documented their difficulty in acquiring an overarching concept of biological life that includes plants as well as humans and non‐human animals. It has also suggested that the acquisition of fundamental biological concepts like alive and die may be influenced by the language used to describe them, as evidenced by differences between English‐ and Indonesian‐speaking children's performance in tasks involving these concepts. Here, we examine one particularly important source of linguistic information available to children during this acquisition process: everyday conversations with their parents. We take a cross‐linguistic approach in analysing the evidence available to English‐ and Indonesian‐speaking children as they acquire meanings for words corresponding to the concepts alive and die . Our analysis illustrates that young children acquiring English and Indonesian are faced with distinct problems, but that parental input in both languages does little to support the acquisition of broad, inclusive biological concepts.