The Impossibility of Childhood Independence

A person’s childhood years are the most formative of her life. In Independence for Children, Matthew Clayton offers a novel argument for why we should protect these years from the arbitrary influence of adults who might try to impose their worldviews, religious doctrines, and conceptions of the good. Children are rightly owed a certain kind of parenting, one which respects that they are their own persons. These are powerful ideas. Nonetheless, this paper argues that childhood independence is neither a practicable ideal nor a sufficiently evaluatively rich ideal to guide parenting. The paper outlines two possible interpretations of Clayton’s anti-perfectionist position: a weaker interpretation focused on parents’ intentions and a stronger interpretation focused on parents’ performance. The weaker account relies on the often illusory distinction between intentions and foreseen results. It also risks being self-defeating. The stronger account faces several challenges, first, that it is impossible for most parents to reconcile a duty to parent in an anti-perfectionist way with their own adherence to a comprehensive worldview. Second, a fortiori it is impossible for parents to be parents without radically shaping their children’s view of the world and how to live in it. Finally, even if parents could provide an anti-perfectionist upbringing for their children, such an upbringing would embrace an overly parsimonious vision of what, and who, matters morally. Ethical independence may be a sensible norm to govern our conduct with other adults, but not our conduct toward children.