Who has Rights to Your Children?

Families are the best, safest, and most efficient environment for child rearing. Yet the national mindset on parenting as portrayed by popular news media is that somehow your children don't belong to you, the parents. Rather, they belong to the community.

A recent MSNBC Promo says, "...we have to break out of our private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities."



The media is confused as to what parenting is -- in that aggregate mind parenting is done either by a single parent, a community, or two parents, and particularly favored in this paradigm are same-sex parents. Yet research continues to prove that children raised in a stable, married family with a mother and a father are the most likely to thrive.

Parents have a constitutionally protected right to direct the upbringing of their children. They also have a duty to protect the best interests of their children. If the community or government has a perspective that infringes on those fundamentally protected rights, that interference is only legally possible if the parents are judicially ruled to be "unfit," acting to the harm and detriment of their children.

So who has rights to your children? Neither the government, the community, nor MSNBC has any legal right to your children. Simultaneously, you have a duty to protect your children's best interests, even to the foregoing of your own autonomy as an adult. Keep your children first, and the community will have no need, and certainly no right, to intervene into your family.