Child-rearing With Minimal Domination: A Republican Account
| Author | Anca Gheaus |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321720906768 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720906768
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(3) 748 –766
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720906768
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Child-rearing With Minimal
Domination: A Republican
Account
Anca Gheaus
Abstract
Parenting involves an extraordinary degree of power over children. Republicans are concerned
about domination, which, on one view, is the holding of power that fails to track the interests of
those over whom it is exercised. On this account, parenting as we know it is dominating due to
the low standards necessary for acquiring and retaining parental rights and the extent of parental
power. Domination cannot be fully eliminated from child-rearing without unacceptable loss of
value. Most likely, republicanism requires that we minimise children’s domination. I examine
alternative models of child-rearing that are immune to republican criticism.
Keywords
domination, republicanism, children, parents, child-rearing
Accepted: 27 January 2020
Introduction
Contemporary civic republicanism is an influential theory about the legitimate exercise of
power. Republicans are concerned about domination, which they deem objectionable and
define as a ‘condition suffered by persons or groups whenever they are dependent on a
social relationship in which some other person or group wields arbitrary power over them’
(Lovett, 2010: 20). Relationships of this kind are dominating whether or not such power is
actually exercised to setback the interests of the subordinated party. Child-rearing is a
state-sanctioned, pervasive social relationship involving an extraordinary degree of power
of some human beings over others. Yet, republicans have had surprisingly little to say
about parenting. Here, I aim to start filling this gap. I claim that republicanism cannot
accommodate the institution of parenthood in its current form because parents hold arbi-
trary power over children to a degree unnecessary to the fulfilment of children’s interests.
Instead, republicans can endorse only the minimal degree of arbitrary power that rear-
ers need to exercise over children in order to protect their interests, though not necessarily
Department of Law, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
Corresponding author:
Anca Gheaus, Department of Law, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Carrer de Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27, 08005
Barcelona, Spain.
Email: agheaus@gmail.com
906768PSX0010.1177/0032321720906768Political StudiesGheaus
research-article2020
Article
Gheaus 749
to maximise their well-being. More than any other theory of legitimate power, republi-
canism requires a profound reform of child-rearing. Republicanism can criticise parent-
ing in its current form while staying clear of the counterintuitive assumptions and
conclusions of other theories that have revolutionary implications for child-rearing, such
as Child-liberationism.1
A republican-friendly theory of child-rearing – as I explain in this article – is also dif-
ferent from liberal accounts; the main difference is that republicans are not only con-
cerned about actual or likely abuses of power, but also about potential ones. For this
reason, republican child-rearing is, in one sense, more demanding than liberal child-rear-
ing. Since republicans, unlike liberals, assume that non-domination is a constraint on the
permissible holding of power, they must require minimally dominating forms of child-
rearing. Specifically, I argue that republican child-rearing requires a division of power
over children as the least dominating child-rearing arrangement. Liberals, too, may
endorse a division of power over children, if and when such arrangement best serves
children’s interests on the whole2 but, unlike republicans, they do not identify an interest
in non-domination. Given the importance they place on non-domination, republicans
should be willing to sacrifice, to some extent, the fulfilment of children’s other interests,
if this is needed to ensure less dominating child-rearing practices. These important differ-
ences aside, liberalism may have the resources to criticise many of the same elements of
the status quo in child-rearing as republicanism, and to support reforms similar to those
that, I shall argue, republicans should support.3
Current forms of parenting involve domination in two different ways. First, existing
standards for acquiring and retaining parental status are too low because they track, in
part, adults’ interests in parenting; instead, they should only track children’s and some
third parties’ interests.4 Second, parents have rights to control their children’s lives that
are more extensive than what is necessary to serve children’s interests. Yet, it is possible
to restructure child-rearing in ways that minimise rearers’ arbitrary power by denying
them some powers which can setback their children’s interests. For instance, republicans
ought to reject parents’ power to oppose medical procedures (like vaccinations) that are
beneficial for the child, and parents’ right to use their child in order to express their own
values in cases when this is detrimental to the child’s interests (e.g. circumcision). More
radically, because republicans oppose monopolies of power, they should deem parents’
power to exclude others from forming beneficial close relationships with the child par-
ticularly objectionable. I briefly sketch institutional arrangements that embody republi-
can child-rearing, such as universal mandatory early day care and a state-mandated,
universal secular, institution of ‘god-parenting’ whereby every child establishes long-
term caring relationships with individuals other than her biological or adoptive parents.
Some preliminary caveats: ‘Right’, unqualified, refers to legal rights. ‘Parenting’ and
‘parent’ refer to the current organisation of child-rearing, in which one or two closely
related custodians have a number of rights in relation with their children, to the exclu-
sion of all other individuals. ‘Child-rearing’ and ‘rearer’ refer to practices and legal
institutions that can, in principle, be legitimate. Readers are free to decide whether
republican child-rearing represents merely a radical reform in parenting or a revolution
large enough to warrant a different name.
The next section explains why republicans ought to pay attention to child-rearing and
why parenting as we have it is dominating. The ‘Domination is not fully eliminable from
child-rearing’ section is about the principled limits to the elimination of all domination
from child-rearing. The ‘Republicans on child-rearing’ section explains why existing
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