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c h a p t e r t w e l v e The Power of Parents and the Agency of Children Hilde Lindemann, Ph.D. The power relationship between parents and children is necessarily asymmetrical. It is a relationship in which physically, emotionally, and socially vulnerable persons must depend on others to keep them safe, nurture them, and teach them how to live within their society. In this chapter I argue that parents are morally remiss if they do not use the power they have over their children, but then I map out some of the moral dangers that beset parents who contemplate wielding that power by authorizing body-shaping surgery for children with physical anomalies. My hope is that by attending to these dangers, parents who face such decisions will be better able to exercise their power responsibly. The Practice of Childcare Let me begin by considering, in the most general terms, what parents are doing when they care for their children. In Maternal Thinking, Sara Ruddick points out that caring for children is a practice—that is, a socially recognized set of behaviors that is governed by rules and has a point (Ruddick 1989). She argues that the point of the practice—to preserve the child’s life and health, to nurture the child’s growth, and to teach the child how to live well among others—determines the kind of thinking in which its practitioners must engage. Keeping the child safe from harm, Ruddick believes , is“the central constitutive, invariant aim”of parental practice. Parents who are committed to achieving that aim do what they can to keep their children from drowning , wandering out into the traffic, eating poisonous substances, falling out the window , running afoul of a child molester, and so on. Children’s need for protection does not automatically guarantee a response on the parents’ part, but parents who engage The Power of Parents and the Agency of Children 177 in the practice of child care must see “the fact of biological vulnerability as socially significant and as demanding care” (ibid., 18, 19). Children grow naturally, given favorable conditions for growing, but producing and maintaining those conditions, Ruddick believes, is an integral part of caring for one’s child. Intellectual and emotional growth can be stunted as readily as physical growth if parents do not attend to it. Parents foster intellectual growth not only by sending their children to school, but by providing a climate in which the children are encouraged to ask questions and to develop their imaginations. Parents foster emotional growth by maintaining an atmosphere in which their children are allowed to express themselves and to know that they are loved. If the point of the practice of caring for one’s children includes preservation and nurturance, then we are already in a position to explain why parents are morally obliged to use their power: failure to do so could leave their children warped, stunted, or dead. The aims of preservation and nurturance do not, however, tell us very much about the moral risks attached to the exercise of parental power. For that, I suggest, we must look at the third part of the point of childcare—socialization. Socialization involves such matters as teaching children to use the toilet,to eat with the proper fork, and to say please and thank you, but more broadly, it involves interacting with one’s children on the basis of some rich and comprehensive notion of what life is about. In socializing their children, parents show them how, according to their own understanding of these matters, the children should live within and make sense of the society in which they are reared. They teach them what usually happens, how they can expect others to behave, what is expected of them, how things are supposed to be—all of which is governed by powerful social norms.They also teach them the consequences of violating these norms. In the process, parents inevitably encumber their children with their own “thick” normative framework. It is thick in the sense that it comprises a complicated and extensive set of beliefs about how to live, covering everything from the behavioral standards of a particular social class or religious community to (for some of us) the principle that one should always replace the cap on the tube of toothpaste. And while grown children may repudiate some of the beliefs in the web that constitutes their parents’ approach to life, they not...

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