Moms for Liberty are wrong about a lot but especially about this: Parents don't always know best.
Ask me how I know
Three years ago, Moms for Liberty didn’t exist. Now, thanks to financial and logistical support from right-wingers tied to the Koch brothers and Ron DeSantis as well as populist blowback to COVID restrictions, vaccine mandates, and so-called “woke indoctrination,” Moms for Liberty has more than 100,000 members across 44 states and hosted presidential candidates at their latest national convention.
“When they mentioned this was a terrorist organization, I said, ‘Well then count me a Mom for Liberty!’” said presidential candidate Nikki Haley, referring to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s designation of the group as an “extremist group,” albeit one that sits squarely in the mainstream of the Republican Party nowadays.
“The principle that ties us all together is that we love our children, we care for our children and we believe that we are the best decision-makers for our children.”
About the only non-controversial thing about Moms for Liberty is the primacy they place on the role of the parent. “We believe parents have the fundamental right to direct the education of their child,” said Tina Descovich, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty. “The principle that ties us all together is that we love our children, we care for our children and we believe that we are the best decision-makers for our children.”
Let’s get some things out of the way: Of course parents have the right to direct the education of their child. Of course (most) parents love and care for their children.
But are parents necessarily the best decision-makers for their children? No, not always, and not even close. How do I know this? I’m a dad, and almost all the time I worry I’m doing the wrong thing.
Often, my concerns are not entirely unfounded. I remember exactly what my oldest son said when his mother and I told the boys that we were splitting up. “It’s not supposed to be this way,” he said. Something cracked in him that day that I have been trying to patch with gold ever since, and that’s not the only time I did something that hurt them.
Keep in mind, I’m not a monster. I don’t hit them. I am not a child molester. I constantly tell them that I love them and that I’m proud of them. I screw up in the everyday ways of an ordinary parent, which is to say I screw up just about every goddamn day, and almost every other parent I know feels the same. We’re doing the best we can, which is never good enough.
I screw up in the everyday ways of an ordinary parent, which is to say I screw up just about every day.
Who are these parents who think themselves best-equipped to direct the totality of their child’s education? I was qualified to teach the boys to read, but there was one day when the youngest came into my bedroom in tears because he had a huge math project due in the morning. Could I help him? Absolutely the hell not! I didn’t understand his homework anymore than I had any notion of how to teach it. (I ended up waking up his older brother, who worked with him on it till after midnight. It’s still one of my favorite memories.)
At best, we have a value set of right and wrong and an intuitive sense of the individual needs of our children. But I can’t diagnose a learning disability anymore than I can diagnose cancer or personality disorder. That’s why we have experts and agreed-upon standards and precautions, such as — I don’t know, let’s pick a hypothetical example — vaccines to prevent the spread of airborne viruses. This is why I sent my sons to public school where they could be taught by trained experts.
It’s hard enough being a father without political groups out there trying to say it’s a parent’s job to police what books they might come across in a library. My sons are in their twenties now, and their needs from me as a dad are different these days. For example, the only butt I’ve wiped for more than a decade is my own. Wiping butts used to be a huge part of being a dad. Honestly, I think I spent more time wiping butt than teaching them to read, though these through lines converged with the biology classic Everybody Poops by Taro Gomi.
After wiping butts came school lunches and laundry and bedtime and getting them up in the morning and to school on time before you went to work like an adult and then picking them up and exactly when was I supposed to know what books should be in the library? Don’t we pay librarians to know that? Sorry, I’ve got to coach soccer practice before somehow getting dinner on the table. I don’t have time to do my own research into the general principles of diagnostic virology. I need to read a chapter of Harry Potter before kissing them goodnight. With any luck, I’ll only have to put them back to bed 17,000 more times. After that, I’ll be sure to tell their teachers how to do their jobs.
And now they’re gone from under my roof. One is in Minnesota working as a park ranger. The other is making the Dean’s List in Austin and thriving in an intensive Arabic program this summer. They are so tall and strong. What need could they possibly still have of me, a balding, bespectacled man with a pronounced limp?
We were sitting at a rooftop restaurant last weekend in Minneapolis, me and S on one side of the table, the boys on the other. I’m probably not the first parent to wonder what do to with such marvelous, independent adult children. Now that they can wipe their own butts — literally and figuratively — what did they need from me?
So I asked them. Reader, I was scared to open my mouth. What if they said, “Nah, dad, we’re good. Tell us more about Adley Rutschman, though.”
They did not. H2 the Younger said he still needed financial support, and with a couple years left of college I’d say he’s correct. But he also said that he needed guidance from me. H1 the Elder said he needed love and support and for me to check in regularly, but then he said something that truly terrified me.
“We want to know what’s going on with you, because we’re adults now, too.”
Suddenly, the field widened, and the job of being a dad got much bigger. I don’t know who these parents are who don’t need teachers and librarians and principals and school nurses to help co-parent their children. The job of taking care of the soul of your child is big enough all on its own without fighting with school boards about whether anyone in your kid’s school should have access to a picture book about Harvey Milk.
“That means education freedom. If your child is in a failing school, you should be able to move your child out of that school.”
Or it could be that Moms for Liberty, with all their help and support from the Koch brothers, et al, isn’t really about parental rights at all. In a recent interview with Semafor, Descovich, the Moms for Liberty co-founder, gave a new definition of parental rights that points to a political agenda bigger than bullying school boards.
“That means education freedom,” she said. “If your child is in a failing school, you should be able to move your child out of that school.”
Obviously, you can already do that, but you know what she’s really talking about, don’t you? This is the first time I’ve read Moms for Liberty advocate so openly for vouchers, or education savings accounts as they like to call them now. The school choice movement, which apparently Moms for Liberty has been a front group for all along, thinks parents have a right to the public funding for education. And that if a parent wants to pull her child from public school, she ought to be able to pull that child’s education funding as well.
Basically, Moms for Liberty wants you to subsidize their choices. Put another way, Descovich, the Koch brothers, and DeSantis think they have a parental right to your tax money. Honestly, I don’t even know where Descovich gets the time to come up with an idea that crazy. Being a parent is hard enough.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
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I read mom's for liberty = Karens for chaos
I agree.