Who Shapes the Child? A Christian Response to the Case Against Parental Rights

As I continue my Christian journey, now as both a father and grandfather, I find myself returning again and again to questions that previous generations perhaps took more for granted.

Who bears the primary responsibility for raising children?

What role should the state, institutions, and wider society play in shaping the moral and emotional formation of the next generation?

And what happens when longstanding understandings of family, faith, and parental responsibility begin to shift beneath our feet?

These are not abstract questions for me. They are deeply personal ones. And they are becoming increasingly urgent for Christian families across Australia.

A Serious Argument Deserves a Serious Response

Recently, I spent considerable time reading a philosophical paper titled Against Parental Rights, authored by legal scholar Samantha Godwin and published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. The paper is not fringe commentary or online outrage material. It is a serious, densely argued academic case, drawing on constitutional law, liberal political theory, and philosophy, and it deserves to be engaged with seriously rather than dismissed.

To be fair, some of the concerns Godwin raises are not imaginary.

Children should never be abused. Parents are not infallible. Authority can be misused. And every child possesses inherent dignity and worth as a human being created in the image of God.

As Christians, we should acknowledge these truths honestly rather than reaching for defensiveness. The history of the church itself contains sobering reminders that authority, even well-intentioned authority, can cause real harm when it operates without accountability.

Yet having read Godwin's paper in full, I was struck by something far deeper beneath the surface than a simple concern for child welfare. What emerges is a fundamentally different vision of what human beings are, what the family is for, and where authority ultimately comes from.

What the Paper Actually Argues

Godwin's central thesis is that parental rights, as they currently exist in law, function not as a means of serving children's best interests, but as a form of quasi-property interest, a residue of historical arrangements in which children were more explicitly treated as their parents' possessions.

She argues that once you recognise this, parental rights become incompatible with liberal and egalitarian commitments to equality. Her conclusion is not modest: she calls for a "deliberate effort to roll back" the constitutional basis of parental rights, describing this as potentially a "multi-generational reform project."

At one point she states plainly:

"A society committed to extending equal protection and equal moral consideration to all people should therefore reject parental rights on grounds of equality."

That is a remarkable statement. And it is worth sitting with its full implications before responding.

Godwin is not merely saying that abusive parents should face consequences. She is saying that the very structure of parental authority, the legal right of parents to make decisions for their children, is itself morally suspect, because it prioritises parental preference over children's autonomous interests.

She goes further still. Parental rights, she argues, "displace and diminish consideration for children's interests and objectify children."

And further again, introducing a concept she calls "desire-contingent goods":

"Parental rights are paradigmatically the right to choose desire-contingent goods for children regardless of whether they are desired or not."

The language is academic, but the implications are profound. Because what are "desire-contingent goods" in Godwin's framework? She is explicit: religion, moral teaching, cultural formation, educational choices, values, and identity.

In other words, the paper argues that parents do not possess legitimate moral authority to shape their children's lives in these ways, because such shaping imposes the parent's preferences on a person who has not yet consented to receive them.

This is where many Christians will recognise the deeper cultural shift that this paper represents.

The Christian Vision of the Family

To understand why this argument strikes at something foundational, it helps to be clear about what the Christian understanding of family actually is, and what it is not.

The Christian tradition does not understand parental authority as ownership. It does not regard children as parental possessions. It does not endorse the domination of the weak by the powerful.

What it does affirm, consistently, across Scripture, is that parents carry a God-given responsibility of stewardship. Children are entrusted to parents not as property but as gifts. Authority flows not from possession but from covenant, and it is answerable not merely to the state, but to God himself.

Moses' instruction to Israel could not be more direct in describing what this looks like in practice:

"These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up." — Deuteronomy 6:6-7

This is precisely the kind of deep, daily, immersive moral formation that Godwin's framework would classify as an illegitimate imposition, the coercive transmission of "desire-contingent goods" onto a child who has not chosen them.

The contrast between these two visions could hardly be sharper.

For Godwin, such formation is a form of objectification, treating the child as an instrument of the parent's purposes rather than as a person with their own emerging autonomy.

For the Christian tradition, such formation is the very expression of love. It is what it means to raise a child well, to pass on not merely food and shelter, but truth, identity, wisdom, and faith.

The Apostle Paul's instruction to fathers in Ephesians 6:4, to bring children up "in the training and instruction of the Lord", is not a license for domination. The same letter explicitly restrains parental power, warning fathers not to embitter or provoke their children. The New Testament vision of family is one of sacrificial love, not coercive control.

But it is unambiguously a vision in which parents carry primary moral responsibility for their children's formation. Children are not blank slates awaiting the neutral judgment of the state. They are image-bearers of God, entrusted to particular families, within particular communities of faith, for particular purposes.

Every Society Forms Children — The Only Question Is Who

Here is the insight that Godwin's framework, for all its philosophical sophistication, never quite confronts.

Every civilisation forms children morally. The real question is never whether children will be shaped, but by whom, according to which worldview, and toward what vision of human flourishing.

Godwin argues that parents imposing their values on children undermines children's autonomy. But she cannot escape the fact that someone will shape those children. If not parents, then who? Teachers. Curriculum designers. Government departments. Digital platforms. Therapeutic frameworks. International policy bodies.

These are not neutral alternatives. They carry their own assumptions, their own anthropologies, their own visions of what a good human life looks like. The question is not whether children will be formed, it is whether the people who know and love them most will be the primary agents of that formation, or whether that role will pass to institutions and systems increasingly distant from the family home.

For most of human history, and across most human cultures, the answer has been clear: parents, supported by faith communities and local culture, carry that primary responsibility. The family has been understood as the seedbed of moral life, the first and most irreplaceable school of virtue, identity, and love.

Godwin's paper represents a serious, sustained attempt to overturn that understanding, and to reground it instead in the principles of liberal egalitarianism.

Christians are right to notice this, and to think carefully about where such arguments lead.

What We Are Already Seeing in Australia

This is not merely a theoretical concern for Australians. These arguments do not remain in the academy. They find expression in policy, in curriculum design, and in the protocols schools develop, or fail to develop, around parental involvement and consent.

As I documented across my three-part series on children, culture, and moral boundaries — Part One, Part Two, and Part Three — the Renmark High School incident in South Australia in 2024 illustrated this tension in concrete terms. Year 9 students were exposed to highly inappropriate material during a Respectful Relationships session delivered by an external presenter, without prior parental notification and without a teacher present in the room. Established safeguards were not followed. Education Minister Blair Boyer and Department chief executive Martin Westwell later acknowledged the failures in parliament.

Parents were denied the opportunity to make informed decisions about whether their children should attend.

The Renmark incident was not merely a procedural failure. It revealed something structurally significant: that spaces have opened within our educational institutions where parental knowledge, consent, and authority are not automatically treated as essential, where institutional programming can occupy the territory that families once held.

Debates around Victoria's Safe Schools program raised similar concerns, with many parents questioning whether resources promoting contested ideas about gender and sexuality were being introduced to young children in ways that bypassed family involvement and reflected particular ideological commitments rather than balanced, evidence-based guidance.

Those concerns were substantive enough to prompt a formal federal government review in 2016, which resulted in significant changes to the program's scope and requirements around parental consent.

These are not isolated incidents. They are local expressions of a broader pattern, and one that becomes clearer when we recognise that in pluralistic societies, institutions increasingly mediate moral formation alongside families. Understanding how that happens requires looking honestly at how ideas travel from academic theory into lived policy reality.

From the Academy to the Policy Table: How Ideas on Parental Rights Travel

One of the things I have observed, and I raise this not to assign malicious intent to every person involved, but because it is simply true and important, is that academic frameworks like Godwin's do not stay in university journals. They travel. And in Australia, as across much of the Western world, the pathway from theoretical argument to government policy is shorter and better organised than most people realise.

The journey typically follows a recognisable pattern. Ideas developed in academic philosophy and legal theory are taken up by advocacy organisations, which refine them into policy language, make formal submissions to parliamentary inquiries, build relationships with sympathetic bureaucrats and ministers, and over time help shape the frameworks within which legislation and departmental guidelines are written.

This is not a conspiracy. It is simply how civil society works, and faith communities have historically engaged in exactly the same process, though in recent decades with considerably less institutional access than many secular advocacy bodies now enjoy.

What concerns me, as someone who watches these developments closely, is the degree to which certain organisations now have regular, formalised access to policymakers on matters directly affecting families, children, and the transmission of values, while the perspectives of traditional faith communities are increasingly treated as special-interest positions requiring justification, rather than as longstanding cultural wisdom deserving a hearing.

In Australia, organisations such as ACON, which describes itself as a health organisation for LGBTQ+ communities and receives substantial government funding, are formally embedded in the development of health, education, and social policy at both state and federal levels. ACON makes regular submissions to government inquiries, provides training to school staff and health professionals, and helps shape the frameworks through which questions of identity, relationships, and sexuality are introduced to young people in institutional settings.

I want to be clear: many of the people working within these organisations are motivated by genuine concern for vulnerable young people, and some of the issues they raise, around bullying, mental health support, and genuine safeguarding, are legitimate and important. Christians who care about human dignity should take those concerns seriously.

But these advocacy frameworks carry assumptions that many Australian families, and particularly families of faith, do not share. At their more theoretical end, they look a great deal like Godwin's argument. Chief among those assumptions is the belief that institutional experts and advocacy-informed policy are better placed than parents to guide children through the most formative questions of identity, values, and meaning.

When those frameworks achieve formal institutional authority through curriculum design, through departmental guidelines, through health policy, the effect is not neutral.

A striking example is the Victorian Department of Education's LGBTIQA+ Student Support policy, which addresses situations where a student and their parents are not in agreement about how the student's gender identity is recognised at school. The policy introduces the concept of a "mature minor", a student assessed as having sufficient maturity to make decisions independently, and indicates that in such cases the school may support the student's affirmed gender identity without requiring parental agreement. I would encourage readers to examine the policy directly and form their own view. Whatever one's position on the underlying question, it is difficult to read that framework without recognising that it structurally repositions parental authority in one of the most significant decisions a family can face.

This displacement rarely comes with a public debate. It tends to arrive quietly, embedded in language about safety, inclusion, and best practice, and by the time most parents become aware of it, it is already embedded in departmental guidelines and staff training.

This is precisely why thoughtful Christians cannot afford to remain disengaged, the policy decisions being made now, often without significant public scrutiny, will shape the environment in which the next generation grows up.

Families of faith have not only a right but a responsibility to be present in those conversations, to make their case clearly, and to ensure that the perspectives of millions of Australians who hold traditional convictions about family and childhood are not simply absent from the rooms where decisions are made.

The Deeper Spiritual Question

What makes this moment particularly significant for Australian Christians is not merely the policy implications, serious as those are. It is the underlying vision of the human person that drives arguments like Godwin's.

Modern liberal political theory begins with the autonomous individual as the fundamental moral unit, and on this account, being shaped by one's parents before one can choose that shaping is not love. It is a constraint on freedom.

The Christian vision begins somewhere else entirely. We begin with the person-in-relationship, created by God, loved before they could earn it, formed through covenant bonds of family and community, and oriented toward a flourishing that transcends individual preference. Children are not primarily self-determining agents to be liberated from their parents' influence. They are image-bearers of God, entrusted to parents not as possessions but as gifts.

When Jesus placed a child in the centre of his disciples and said "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these" (Matthew 19:14), he was declaring that a child's worth before God is not contingent on their capacity for autonomous choice, but on the love of their Creator.

And when Paul honoured the faith that passed from Timothy's grandmother Lois to his mother Eunice, and from her to him (2 Timothy 1:5), he was describing exactly what Godwin would classify as an illegitimate imposition, the patient, intergenerational transmission of sincere faith within a family. Paul did not see this as objectification. He saw it as love taking form across time.

This is the vision the Christian tradition has carried for two thousand years. It is worth defending, and worth living.

Neither Fear Nor Withdrawal

As Christians, however, we should resist the temptation toward either fear or outrage as our primary response.

The answer to these challenges is not anger. It is not withdrawal from society. It is not a siege mentality that treats the wider culture as simply hostile territory to be defended against.

The answer is the harder, slower, more demanding work of living out authentic Christian virtue within our families and communities, so that what we claim to believe about children, family, and human dignity is actually visible in the way we live.

That means sacrificial love rather than domination. Truth rather than manipulation. Moral courage without contempt for those who disagree. Responsibility without coercion. And genuine, costly care for children as image-bearers of God, not because it is culturally convenient, but because it flows from who we understand ourselves, and them, to be.

It also means engaging thoughtfully with arguments like Godwin's, understanding them well enough to respond to them honestly, rather than simply reacting with indignation. The strength of a position is tested by its willingness to encounter serious objections and still hold. And the Christian vision of family, grounded in Scripture and tested across centuries of human experience, is strong enough for that test.

But perhaps the most important thing Christians can do in this cultural moment is this: actually be what we claim to believe.

There is a sobering reality beneath arguments like Godwin's that Christians must face honestly. When scholars and activists come to view the natural family as inherently dangerous to children, they are not responding to nothing. They are responding, at least in part, to genuine experiences of harm, control, and failure within homes that claimed the name of Christ. Every Christian family that operates through domination rather than love, through fear rather than grace, through control rather than covenant, quietly lends credibility to the very arguments we rightly want to challenge.

And we should be clear-eyed about something else: Christian families face the same cultural headwinds and the same internal temptations as every other family in Australia. The pressures that fracture families do not stop at the church door. Financial stress, overwork, isolation, the numbing pull of alcohol, the quiet devastation of drug dependency, the corrosive reach of pornography into marriages and homes, these are not exclusively secular problems. They are human problems, and they assault Christian families with the same force they assault everyone else.

I speak here not from a position of superiority but from honest self-knowledge. My own journey to faith came later in life, and I carry with me the weight of knowing how far I have fallen short as a husband and father. It is precisely that awareness, of my own brokenness and of the grace that has met me in it, that makes me want to defend the design rather than abandon it. Not because I have lived it perfectly, but because I have seen enough of its truth to know it is worth pursuing.

The answer, then, is not merely better arguments. It is better witness.

The Witness We Are Called to Be

This means understanding and living the Christian vision of family not as a hierarchy of power, but as a reflection of the Triune God himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in whom authority and love are never separated. It means a husband and father who leads not by demand but by servant-hearted sacrifice, as Christ loved the church. It means a wife and mother whose complementary role is not diminishment but partnership, a different expression of the same dignity, the same calling, the same love. And children raised not into fearful compliance, but into the freedom that comes from knowing they are unconditionally known and loved

When that vision is genuinely lived, it becomes its own argument. It makes the premise of Godwin's paper, that parental authority is structurally a mechanism of objectification, not just intellectually answerable, but visibly implausible.

And it means extending genuine grace to those who, from whatever background or experience, have arrived at very different conclusions. I do not know Samantha Godwin's story, and I will not presume to. But I do know that all of us, every human being who has ever drawn conclusions about family, authority, and love, have done so from within lives that are broken and incomplete in ways we often cannot fully see.

That includes me. Christianity does not begin with the assumption that other people are the problem. It begins with the recognition that all of humanity is fallen, that none of us reasons from a position of unclouded clarity, and that the grace extended to us in Christ is the same grace we are called to extend to others, even, and perhaps especially, to those with whom we most deeply disagree.

That posture, conviction held with humility, truth spoken with grace, is not weakness. It is the most distinctively Christian thing we can bring to these conversations.

The Questions That Matter Most

Because ultimately, the deepest cultural questions confronting Australia today are not merely political. They are not merely educational. They are spiritual.

What is a child? What is a family? Where does authority come from? And what vision of human flourishing will shape the next generation?

For me personally, as a father who has watched his children grow, and now as a grandfather watching grandchildren begin their own journey, I remain firmly convinced that strong, loving, morally grounded families remain one of the greatest gifts and one of the greatest protections any society possesses.

Not because parents are perfect. We are not.

Not because families never fail. They do.

But because children need more than systems, policies, and institutions, however well-intentioned those systems may be. They need to be truly known by people who will still be there when the programs end and the experts move on.

They need truth that is lived, not merely administered. Stability that is embodied in relationship, not just legislated. Moral formation that comes from people who love them not as clients or subjects, but as their own. And love, the particular, irreplaceable, covenant love, that begins and is most deeply sustained closest to home.

The family is not a problem to be solved by better policy architecture.

It is the first school of what it means to be human.

And for Christians, it remains one of God's most extraordinary designs. We are imperfect stewards of it, to be sure. But it is irreplaceable, because the love it carries, at its best, reflects something of the love with which God himself regards his children.

The task before Australian Christians is therefore not merely to resist ideas we disagree with, though that resistance, when grounded in love and truth, is entirely legitimate. It is to build homes and communities so marked by grace, sacrifice, honesty, and stability that they become living testimony to the wisdom of God's design. That is a long and demanding calling. But it is also, I believe, one of the most joyful things a human being can give themselves to.