Centering Children: Challenging the 'Parental Rights' Narrative for the Sake of Our Kids
What Ryan Stollar’s Kingdom of Children Teaches Us About Prioritizing Children’s Rights and Protections
What if we started with children: not as just extensions of their parents, not as future adults, but as full human beings with voices, needs, and rights of their own?
That is the moral imperative at the heart of Ryan “R.L.” Stollar’s Kingdom of Children (an outstanding book that I highly recommend to everybody interested in child advocacy, child well-being, and the concept of Children’s Liberation Theology).
Drawing on his experiences within conservative Christian homeschooling communities and his advocacy for survivors of abuse, Stollar makes a powerful case for re-centering children in our faith traditions, our families, our communities, and our politics. His is not merely a critique of bad parenting or misguided policy — it is a call for a fundamental transformation: to recognize children deserving of protection, dignity, and voice.
Stollar’s vision and message could not be more urgent.
In the federal debate over the budget reconciliation bill (which I am calling “The Big, Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Bill”), Congress proposes over $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and SNAP benefits or food stamps. The authors of the bill seem to ignore what this means for children, and instead, focus on adult incentives, paperwork, and cost savings. The inevitable result? Higher uninsured rates for children and increased child hunger.
At the same time, the bill excludes 20 million children from the full Child Tax Credit, prioritizing ideological concerns about adult “work incentives” over reducing child poverty. The children “left behind” are low-income children who are disproportionately babies and toddlers, children in rural areas, kids in larger families, and children in single-parent households. The choice to disproportionately harm these children, framed as neutral or even pro-family, is devastating to children. The bill pushes millions of children into poverty, which is a policy decision that leads to poorer child health, reduced education outcomes, higher rates of child hunger and homelessness, and increased rates of child abuse.
While politicians like to proclaim they are acting in the interests of children, their policies repeatedly fail the next generation. In this bill, those children most in need will receive the least. The suffering of children, which should be a moral red line, becomes a political side effect.
Too often, we organize our political, legal, religious, and social systems around the adults in the room, particularly the parents, while children’s needs are ignored, assumed, or subordinated.
And the problem isn’t limited to federal budgets. Across the country, the growing “parental rights” movement demands that we elevate the authority of parents over the autonomy and safety of children and youth.
In Texas, lawmakers have advanced a potential constitutional amendment to enshrine parental rights, with little to no opposition in the Texas Legislature, even from those who often claim to defend children. While framed as pro-family, this effort (and others like it) threatens the health, education, safety, and well-being of kids.
As legal scholar Adam Benforado asserts in A Minor Revolution, America’s political and legal systems are built on adult-centric assumptions that marginalize children’s interests, even in matters that directly affect their health, safety, education, and bodily autonomy.
The growing movement to center parental rights is part of a much broader failing to center children in society. In fact, the goal is to marginalize children.
As Stollar attests:
…parental rights advocates are not content with simply affirming the rights of parents as one set of rights – a set alongside the rights of the government to protect children and the constitutional rights of their children to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Parental rights advocates want to deny children their own rights.
We must demand better for our children and for the kind of society we want to be. Doing so requires a deeper reckoning with how we value children in our politics, our legal systems, our institutions, our religious systems, and our hearts.
I. The Rise of the Parental Rights Movement: From Sovereignty to Supremacy
American lust for freedom has also created a ‘parental rights’ movement that turns parents into gods, instead of listening to God’s command to protect and value children.
— Ryan Stollar, Kingdom of Children
The modern parental rights movement began, at least ostensibly, as a defense of family privacy and autonomy, especially in reaction to perceived overreach by public education systems and child welfare agencies. But over the past four decades, that defense has curdled into something more dangerous: a push for near-absolute parental sovereignty, where the role of the state is not to ensure children’s safety or rights. This movement seeks a rollback of a century of gains related to the protection of children.
Organizations like Focus on the Family and the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) have played a major role in popularizing this ideology. Framing even modest regulatory efforts as attacks on the family, they have vigorously opposed oversight of homeschooling, fought child protection laws, and lobbied for sweeping parental exemptions from education and health requirements. These efforts helped transform parental rights from a principle into a political weapon.
Underlying the parental rights and homeschooling movements is the concept of patria potestas, which is that children belong to fathers or parents. For some, this principle is all-encompassing and includes the right to control all aspects of the lives of children, even with respect to life itself.
As Barbara Bennett Woodhouse points out in her book Hidden in Plain Sight: The Tragedy of Children’s Rights from Ben Franklin to Lionel Tate:
As late as 1920, a parent who killed a child in the course of punishment could claim a legal excuse for homicide in no fewer than nine states.
The parental rights movement often paints government intervention as a threat (“We don’t co-parent with government!” is a frequent rallying cry), even when it’s intended to stop child abuse or educational neglect.
Stollar notes that “the United States has one of the worst child abuse records among industrialized nations” in that, on average, five children a day die because of abuse and neglect. Unfortunately, religion has played a role in this tragedy. According to Stollar:
Many churches have protected adults who prey upon children by not reporting the abuses to authorities and allowing the abusers to remain in close proximity to children… Many churches have taught parents that God wants them to hurt their children by using corporal punishment and the threat of eternal damnation to force obedience.
Adds former pastor Brian Recker in his Substack:
In this framework, the way for a child to enter the kingdom of God is to be broken — drained of their will and agency — and forced to surrender to the authority of their parents, their pastors, and any other patriarchal, hierarchical leader.
The consequence is that, after a century of advances in child safety and fundamental rights, we are now witnessing a series of rollbacks that threaten to weaken a whole array of children’s protections.
Stollar explains:
Children have no voice in all sorts of matters: from their medical care to immigration rights to education to government representation. In several states, parents can legally allow their children to die by denying them medical care – provided those parents have ‘religious reasons’ for doing so. Children have no authority in the matter. The rights of parents supersede children’s rights. In fact, most US states – thirty-four of them – allow parents and other caregivers of children numerous religious exemptions from child abuse and neglect laws… It also includes exemptions from misdemeanor or felony criminal charges for inflicting injury to a child.
At the state level, we are also seeing losses for children with respect to child labor, corporal punishment, adolescent health, child marriage, book bans, curriculum censorship, and the denial of legal representation to children.
The policy, often cited as the Parents’ Bill of Rights, was originally proposed as a constitutional amendment at the federal level but is now being pushed in states across this country. The language seeks to “protect the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing, medical care, and education of their children.” Texas has proposed a constitutional amendment that would adopt similar language and will be on the statewide ballot on November 4, 2025.
These initiatives overlook some fundamental truths of importance to children and their lives, including:
Children need the support by both parents and government to thrive, but sometimes need protection from parents and government, such as when children are physically or sexually abuse by parents and the government’s child welfare and juvenile justice systems compound and unduly harm children
Some parents use their “rights” in harmful or detrimental ways to children and fail to live up to their “responsibilities”
Children have fundamental needs, concerns, and rights that should be recognized (and not ignored) as a bedrock of child well-being and protection
Children are not the property of their parents
II. The Weaponization of Concern About Children: Moral Panic as Political Strategy
We live today in a word that does not value children like it should. We live, in many ways, in an anti-child world. Our world uses children and abuses children. Our world reduces children to political fodder. Our world objectifies children. Our world forces children to serve as battlegrounds for debates about God instead of respecting them as image bearers of God.
— Ryan Stollar, Kingdom of Children
In a world that claims to love children, it's worth asking: why are their voices, concerns, needs, and best interests so often missing from the very debates that claim to defend them? Far too often, the policies adopted are, as Stollar puts it, “anti-child.”
In recent years, conservative politicians and advocacy groups have taken up the language of “protecting children” with growing fervor, particularly in debates over school curricula, LGBTQ rights, and public health. As Stollar writes, “our world uses children and abuses children.” And often, it does so in the name of saving them.
Moral panics are not new, but recent child-centered ones — from QAnon conspiracy theories like Pizzagate to anti-drag legislation to bans on “furries” to book bans to bans on gender-affirming care to misinformation about childhood immunizations — have been supercharged by the rhetoric of parental rights.
These campaigns frame children as vulnerable and under threat, but the policies they produce rarely address the really important issues like education, child care, child abuse, hunger, poverty, or lack of health care. Instead, they narrowly focus on controlling what health care children receive and what they are allowed to read, learn, and know.
Stollar notes that these examples of “moral panic” often lead to misdirection and focus by “conjuring up fake monsters and encouraging people to chase after windmills.”
Stollar continues:
Movements of moral panic also make people who might be allies to children’s issues suspicious of legitimate efforts to protect children.
In this climate, attention to the real issues, concerns, and needs of kids gets sidelined or ignored. The result is tragic: a real policy agenda of importance to children is ignored while attention is focused on culture war theatrics.
Child Rights Denied in the Name of Parental Rights
What’s most insidious is how these efforts claim the mantle of “rights.” But these are not children’s rights. As Stollar incisively notes, the parental rights movement does not simply want to elevate parents: it wants to deny children their own rights.
In other words, the movement appropriates the language of liberty while reinforcing the status of children as objects — owned, managed, and spoken for by adults. It invokes freedom and rights, but not for kids.
Homeschool leader J. Richard Fugate has argued that parental power and authority should be unlimited. Fugate argues:
There is no such thing as ‘child rights’ sanctioned by the Word of God. The child has only the God-given right to be raised by his parents without the intervention of any other institution.
Stollar points out that the beneficiary of such a policy would be child abusers. From his experience, he explains:
The adult claims the child wanted it – or the child deserved it – or the child masterminded it – or the child needed it – or the child was sinful. Abusers constantly try to shift blame for abuse onto the victims of their abuse.
In many states, Benforado adds, “even after a child gets gravely – and obviously – ill, a parent is permitted to decide against medical care.” Furthermore, parents often have the authority to deny their children access to prevention measures such as immunizations, mental health or substance abuse treatment, or even life-saving cancer treatment.
The consequences are, far too often, tragic and deadly.
III. Reimagining a Child-Centered Society and a Children’s Liberation Theology
In the right-here and right-now, children have needs and wants just as adults do, and they deserve to have their needs and wants heard and valued.
— Ryan Stollar, Kingdom of Children
If the parental rights movement tells us anything, it confirms that American society is often profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of children as people with fundamental rights themselves. We honor them in the abstract — “children are the future” — but deny them voice, agency, and rights in the present. Children become ideals to protect, not individuals with concerns, needs, or best interests that should be addressed.
Consequently, Stollar calls for a “child liberation theology,” one rooted in the belief that children bear the image of God and are therefore worthy of love, safety, and voice — in the “right-here and right now.”
While grounded in religious language, this idea holds power even for secular audiences. The first step in building a child-centered society is listening rather than ignoring. That may sound simple, but it requires profound change: changing how schools operate, how courts assess custody, how our health care system provides care, and how politicians make decisions. In practice, it means asking children what they think, respecting their boundaries, honoring their feelings, and changing course when they tell us something isn’t working.
Before taking action, it means asking the question: “Is it good for the children?”
We must respect, listen to, and understand the concerns, needs, and best interests of children. It also means resisting the deep cultural impulse to pathologize children who speak up or push back.
As Stollar concludes:
We need to let go of the idea that children who try to lead are more rebellious, troublesome, sinful, or whatever other negative adjectives come to mind.
Agency in children is not rebellion. It’s humanity.
Policy That Puts Children First
A child-centered society would look radically different in policy terms, such as:
Expanding health coverage to ALL children rather than slashing Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Affordable Care Act in ways that will increase the number of uninsured children or restrict access to medical care.
Adopting policies that cut child poverty, such as making the Child Tax Credit fully refundable, rather than imposing “baby and child penalties” upon the 20 million children “left behind” because their parents make “too little” in income.
Prioritizing child well-being in public budgets, treating investments in nutrition, housing, and early education as foundational infrastructure rather than shortchanging our kids.
Stollar challenges churches — and, by extension, all institutions that claim moral authority — to reckon with their complicity in systems that harm children. Too often, churches have shielded abusers, encouraged harsh discipline, or dismissed the testimony of the very children they claim to nurture.
Stollar writes:
Many churches have protected adults who prey upon children... and taught parents that God wants them to hurt their children.
Whether in churches or secular systems, we need a cultural reckoning that centers children.
Stollar’s Kingdom of Children makes the case for such a theological and political reckoning — a call to lift the voices of children in places where they’ve been suppressed: in the halls of Congress, church, the courtroom, and the kitchen table.
Benforado echoes this call for change through a secular lens. He argues that, unless we upend our adult-centric assumptions, we will continue to build a society that fails the very people it claims to protect.
It is not enough to “care about children.” We must act with them, for them, and often on their terms.
Stollar maintains:
When children are allowed to suffer, that is not only a personal failure. It is a wholesale failure on the part of the nation.
So let’s be clear:
A bill that imposes work requirements on parents of 7-year-olds while ignoring the hunger that results is not pro-child.
A tax code that excludes 20 million children from anti-poverty benefits is not pro-family.
A constitutional amendment that silences child welfare systems to enshrine parental power is not about freedom — it’s about control.
If we are to be a society that truly believes in justice and dignity, we must start with our children as the moral center. We must reject the rhetoric of rights that ignores the reality of harm. We must see children. Hear them. Protect them. And build policy that enables them to flourish.