Last week, the government decided that parents in England shouldn’t be banned from hitting their kids. The fact that I’ve used the word “hitting” here — as opposed to the more sanitised “smacking” — might give you an indication of my own view on this. 

I don’t think “reasonable” chastisement is ever reasonable. As Sonia Sodha wrote in the Observer, there is incontrovertible evidence that physically punishing children is harmful; it triggers a cycle of shame in both perpetrator and victim. Yet somehow this doesn’t bother the government. After all, it’s not really about child welfare, but identity politics. 

The child is an emblem, a symbol of what kind of person you are

Last year, then-Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi declared that “we have got to trust parents on this, and parents being able to discipline their children is something that they should be entitled to do”. He stressed the need to avoid ending up “in a world where the state is nannying people about how they bring up their children”. 

I wonder how far this fear of “nannying” extends. When making a bid to be Tory leader, Zahawi promised to protect children from “from damaging and inappropriate nonsense being forced on them by radical activists”. I’m guessing this means, on his terms, that parents who take their children to drag queen story hour cannot be trusted, whereas those who physically assault them can. 

I’m not suggesting these are the same thing, or that one cannot object to one without objecting to the other. It just seems to me that the child isn’t the starting point for either choice. It’s all about where you position yourself in the so-called culture wars. To some people, the child is an emblem — a symbol of what kind of person you are and what, indeed, you think other people are for. 

In a recent piece in New York Magazine the writer Sarah Jones announced, rather obviously, that children are not property. Of course they are not. The relationship of care and dependency between children and guardians is complex, unlike any other on Earth. In the act of caring, it can be hard to separate preparing the child to form independent relationships in an imperfect world, from seeking to make them a reflection of ourselves and our values (and thus implicating them in our own compromises). This is something maternal feminists have explored in some detail, not that you would know it from Jones’ piece. 

In the latter, there are goodies (left-wing people like her) and baddies (right-wingers who promote their politics under the guise of defending “parents’ rights”):

 … conservatives betray a conviction that a child is the property of parents. Because parents own their children, they can dispose of the child as they see fit. They can deny them evidence-based medical care. They can put a child to work. They can make sure a child is sheltered from the dangers of a serious education. When a child goes hungry, that’s because a parent isn’t caring for their property — and what a person does with their property is their right.

In Jones’s world, people who don’t share her political views — and only those people — treat parental rights as “merely one path to the total capture of state power and the imposition of an authoritarian hierarchy on us all”. Meaning that if, say, you have some questions over whether puberty blockers should be prescribed to unhappy children, or worry about them being taught to define themselves according to regressive sex-role stereotypes, you don’t think children are people, but view them as tools in your bid for ideological domination. 

In the middle, there’s long-suffering Mummy — the actual parent

Somewhat amusingly, Jones grants one type of parent a free pass, rights-wise: “trans-affirming parents”. She does so by flipping the argument around, treating such parents as “one exception to the right’s belief in absolute parental rule”. What this shows, however, is the way in which one side’s “nannying” is another side’s “won’t somebody please think of the children” pearl-clutching. Whether you’re Jones or Zahawi, it seems you know with absolute certainty that the other side doesn’t care about kids. They just have an agenda to push and are out to interfere with your purer, more righteous model of care. 

The more I see the way in which children are positioned in this play-off between extreme right and left, the more it reminds me of two fatherhood caricatures. On the right, it’s Victorian Dad: the strict, violent traditionalist, who rules with fear and measures success by obedience. On the left, it’s Slacker Dad, who lets you do what you want, has no rules and measures success by how popular he is with the kids. 

In the middle, there’s long-suffering Mummy — the actual parent, who tries to balance care and boundaries, who lets you dress how you please but won’t buy you a binder, whose politics might be “actual violence” but who’d never resort to actual violence, who respects who you are right now but knows that you still have growing to do. No one likes long-suffering Mummy. Victorian Dads are feared but grudgingly respected; Slacker Dads are adored. Years later, when the kids have grown up and stopped idolising either, Mummy will be blamed for their flaws. 

It’s not that metaphorical Mummy has all the answers. All parents make mistakes, and all of us impose our prejudices on our children to a greater or lesser extent. What disturbs me now is the way in which political polarisation has sucked the nuance out of any discussion of children’s rights and the limits that must be placed on them. 

Left and right should do better than apportion which forms of harm they inflict (child beauty pageants for you, child drag shows for me!) before pointing the finger at one another. Why can’t both be wrong? “When do parents know best?” is not an easy question. The answer is rarely so simple as “whenever they’re doing the opposite of what their political opponents think is right”.