I ask this question because I caught a bit of The O’Reilly Factor last week and in between O’Reilly screeching at people to SHUT UP!!!, he had a piece about a law being passed in california which allows school kids to leave school to have medical procedures done and the schools can’t/won’t tell the parents about it.
Naturally O’Reilly was screeching and bleating and blowing gaskets left and right about this, but one thing he said caught my ear. The line was something like, “But minors have too many Constitutional rights!!!”
The woman he was interviewing tried to set him straight on that one, but O’Reilly being O’Reilly, she didn’t get very far.
Do minors have all of the Constitutional rights that adults do? If not, what ones don’t they have?
And do you think they should have all the rights that adults have?
While I can see many situations where extending identical rights to a child would create a problem (e.g., 4-year-old Charles wishes to go for a walk, expressing this wish by running down the sidewalk just as the family gets out of the car during their first visit to the Big City. I vote for the parent to be able to scoop him up), I think there needs to be a formal structure through which a child can demonstrate relevant decision-making capacity and then indicate that a given decision, normally reserved for the custodial parents/guardians, is the one that the child wishes to make, and by doing so override parental or other adult authority.
I also think there is absolutely no excuse for rules and conventionalities that invade children’s decision-making authority or privacy in situations where an adult’s would be legally respected, and does so for no particular reason other than “because they are kids and therefore we can”. For example, there’s no excuse for restricting freedom of speech, association, the press, etc., in schools as appears to be the normative case nowadays. While the school is not obligated to print whatever children write, and can restrict distribution of material produced by the kids themselves to off-campus locations, the latter should require some defending for reason (i.e., unless absolutely every publication not produced on campus is denied on-campus distribution opportunities, it should not be permissible to prevent distribution of student-generated material on the sole basis that it is in fact student-generated material). Students should have the same right of private expression as any adult, i.e., poems or fiction or other material that they write or happen to carry on their person should no be subject to any scrutiny until/unless they attempt to present it to other students on campus in a public fashion, and then only laws prohibiting threats or other demonstrably disruptive speech – such as would apply to an adult speaker, for example – should apply.
I think they should have all the rights that adults have when they have all the legal, moral and financial responsibility for themselves.
You can’t put all of the responsiblility on parents (or anyone, for that matter) without giving them all of the control. It is untenable, and unfair in any situation, IMO.
If the parents can be absolved of legal responsibility for the actions of their children (and the consequences that may occur) outside of their control, especially when that control is removed by an outside authority i.e. the state or school or what have you, then that might be different.
However, unless I’m mistaken, I think that I’m legally, morally and financially responsible for my children and all of their actions, and all of the consequences of those actions, until they reach the age of majority. Therefore, my ‘mandate’ to fulfill my responsibilities may supercede their right to autonomy, in some circumstances, at least until they reach the age of majority.