Authority and Responsibility and Children

We live in a world where children believe they have the right and the authority to make decisions about their participation or non-participation in all manner of situations and relationships. This legitimacy is peddled in many quarters including education and school, child protection, and so on. Children, especially of adolescent age, ordinarily believe they have the authority to make statements of this order (i.e. custody arrangement preferences) and the authority to implement the implications and decisions that follow from such statements. This is not the authority children of an earlier generation were possessed of. This is not intended to be a critique of such a social change but to simply note that it is so.  

The more legitimate cultural critique of this proposition is the fact that such authority to participate or not participate in a particular relationship is legitimized across the board and that such authority is not tied to the congruent responsibility that such authority ordinarily implies. The alignment of age-appropriate responsibility with age-appropriate authority in relationship to the activities of everyday life and the body is a central developmental precept in all cultures and all forms of human social and family organization. When responsibility and authority are not appropriate and not aligned there is an attendant risk to the development of that child. Too much authority and too little responsibility can produce everything from unchecked violence to deeply internalized anxiety. Too much responsibility and too little authority is ordinarily oppressive and at the heart of many forms of child exploitation, abuse and neglect.  

It may well be that the inertia or inaction of one biological parent leaves the emotional and psychological space vacant for a corruption of ordinary development to occur.  

In any parent-child relationship, the parent must hold age-appropriate authority in relation to their own child. Such responsibility extends beyond basic and everyday parenting tasks that every parent needs to engage with, to the way in which a parent behaves in relation to their child, taking responsibility for their interactions with that child, offering support, discipline, and for what is shared between them. When responsibility and authority are not appropriate and not aligned there is an attendant risk to the development of that child. Too much authority and too little responsibility can produce everything from unchecked violence to deeply internalized anxiety. Too much responsibility and too little authority is ordinarily oppressive and at the heart of many forms of child exploitation, abuse and neglect. A lack of responsibility within the parent-child relationship for the way in which a parent conducts themselves in relation to the child or children may result in that child or children attempting to either reasonably or unreasonably distance themselves from that parent.