There is no war on parents, though if the work of a growing number of philosophers becomes known to certain kinds of political commentators we may very well begin hearing there is. Careful and creative philosophical work on parenting is increasing, which is wonderful, but it is striking how quickly a range of radical positions is becoming orthodoxy. These include claims such as: 

1. parents have no moral right to impart their religious beliefs to their children;
2. parents should not have a legal right to have their children privately educated;
3. parents should not have a legal right to homeschool their children;
4. families where two biological parents raise their own children should not be favored over those in which any of a number of different constellations of adults are raising children;
5. the moral and perhaps legal standards of minimally decent parenting requires that children not be taught certain things, such as that homosexuality is immoral, or that traditional gender roles are justified by natural differences between men and women.

To be clear, one would be hard pressed to find a philosopher who endorses all these things, but it is easy now to find many thinkers actively arguing any combination of them. 

1)-3) unite a sizable number of philosophers along two axes. One is a concern that parents doing their best to raise their children to be Catholics or Baptists or Buddhists or, for that matter, hard core Atheists are violating their children’s autonomy. That parents should not do this leads readily to the view that the state should not be in the business of funding schools that are designed to produce true believers on behalf of parents—a concern most pressing in the UK, where relations between church, state, and education seem deliberately designed to confuse Americans. This concern intersects with a worry about the advantages fancy pants private schooling confers on children whose parents can afford it, something which offends even mildly egalitarian sensibilities. Conjoined these concerns suggest a case for the abolition of private schooling. Calls for the abolition of homeschooling seems to follow apace. 

That biological relatedness is irrelevant to being a parent is close to unchallenged in recent work in parenting ethics, and the conviction that a variety of combinations of adults can equally well raise children seems to follow readily enough. The urgency of 4) is further fueled by its frequent appearance as a premise in defenses of gay parenting, a move that once made renders fixating on two parents—or their gender—look arbitrary. Current fascination with polyamory pushes things even further.

5) emerges from the conjunction of a commitment to gender equality and gay rights, an appreciation of the role of socialization in transmitting beliefs and values that contribute to sexism and discrimination against gays, and a conviction that growing up in a family that embraces such beliefs and values is itself harmful to children, girls and children who are themselves gay in particular.

Each of these proposition challenges an aspect of parental authority that most people I would guess take for granted. Taken together they seem to look forward to a world where the most basic of traditional assumptions about parenthood have been cast aside. Such a world will look particularly pernicious to those who hold to traditional beliefs rooted in religious convictions, including those convinced that modern liberal democracies are engaged in a ‘war’ against Christianity or, more broadly, traditional religiously informed ways of life.

I find myself oddly situated in this intellectual landscape. I’ve argued expressly against 1) and 5), and I’ve been working on things opposing 2) and 3). I’ve had little to say about 4), though some things I have said push back against it as well. However, I arrive at my position from starting points that I share with those would would defend these theses much more often than I side with those who would be most appalled. More, all five are close to views I would defend, and all reflect a lot of insightful thinking. A handful of rather subtle errors, I think, have led people astray. The problem is these errors are becoming unquestioned assumptions that will undermine future work in the ethics of parenting. To be continued.