Why Are We Hearing So Much about “Parents’ Rights?”

Nathan Holbert:

Welcome to Pop Off, a little spin-off segment that we've been doing here at Pop & Play where we take a few minutes to chat about education, play, and pop culture as it's happening in the public conversations. I'm your host, Nathan Holbert, and with me as always, is she who plays through rage, Haeny Yoon.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Good one. Good one. I love it. Our ideas for Pop Offs is a new episode in your feed every few weeks while you wait for a Pop & Play season five. I know you're very excited to hear what we have to pop off on.

Today, we're talking about the phrase, and very controversial, "parents' rights." This is not a new phrase, though. It's been bubbling up in the public conversation because of the Trump administration's threat to shutter the Department of Education. We didn't want to take that on. That seems a little bit too big. Maybe someday. Among the few weak reasons given for shuttering this department is "parents' rights."

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, and as Haeny said, we are probably not the right podcast if you really care about educational funding and going deep on those types of policy decisions.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Which is worth it to think about.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, yeah, somebody else, though.

 

Haeny Yoon:

But not with us. We are not experts.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Go find that podcast and then share it with us so that we can listen to it too.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes, educate us, please.

 

Nathan Holbert:

But we do have lots of opinions about this phrase "parents' rights" or "parental rights." So, the notion of the phrase is that there is a certain set of rights parents have, and when it's framed in that way, it's explicitly identifying the fact that parents have rights over children, that parents have rights, and children need to not have the rights. They have to lose a certain set of agency so that the parents can have the agency, the rights, the control that they want, and so it always really bugs me to hear this phrase.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Tell me when you first heard about it. Where did you first come across this phrase?

 

Nathan Holbert:

It's funny that you should say that. I was going to ask you that question, but I do have an answer. I think I remember first hearing it around COVID, and in that context, it was really tied to the right to send your kid to school, the right to send your kid to school without a mask or without vaccinations. I'm certain it had existed before that, but I think that's the first time it really became apparent to me. How about you? Do you ...

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, maybe it was COVID. I do feel like maybe previously before that I'd heard about it related to curriculum, related to book bans, things like that because I feel like one way that maybe politics plays into schooling and curriculum is to talk about parents and their rights versus what is actually shared in the curriculum.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Right, and, in fact, this is the most explicit. A well-known example of this in recent years is the Parental Rights and Education Act from 2022.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Tell us about it.

 

Nathan Holbert:

You might know this. This is a law that was passed in Florida, but you probably know it by a different name. Any guesses what you might know this law as in Florida?

 

Haeny Yoon:

I'm going to whisper because now you're going to tell us what it is, but the whispering is supposed to be a premonition.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Okay. This is also known as the Don't Say Gay Law. But yeah, so this law being essentially the idea that you're not allowed to talk about anything related to gender in elementary school, and, of course, you can wave your hand, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, gender as a thing, you can't talk about it," but that could be anything. The vagueness is why it's such a toxic and problematic thing. It becomes a way in which it becomes code for anything that we might define as woke or anything that we might think of as yucky or weird or outside of some white, middle-class norm is problematic and has to be excluded. Why? Because parents have the right to determine what their children can hear or be exposed to in the classroom, so just like you said the curriculum.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, and I feel like it gets exacerbated by what the media puts out, or let's just say Donald Trump puts out when he over-exaggerates what's going to happen to your kid at school if they go there. They're going to come out trans. Then he ties that in with some kind of rule about gender or some kind of conversation about gender that comes up. So, I just feel like it gets hyper-exaggerated, and then people get really intense about it because they tie this with a very extreme measure that is actually not true.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, 100%. Just to add to that pile of things, in addition to it being stuff that happens in the classroom, this term also comes up around internet stuff, social media.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Laws, right?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Give us an example.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I believe in Utah, there was a law a few years ago, maybe a year ago ... I didn't look up the date on this one. Sorry ... but that basically was framed again around parental rights, and it made it so that children under a certain age couldn't have social media accounts and made it so that they couldn't use social media accounts after a certain time of day in the evening. You're like it's banned at certain times. Again, all this is around the idea that parents should have the right to know what their kids are being exposed to on the internet. So, what does all this really come down to? It comes down to this notion of fear and this notion of control.

I was trying to think as a parent, I have two small kids, and I've told you this before, but the thing that I'm most terrified of is YouTube. I'm really horrified of the idea that-

 

Haeny Yoon:

Why YouTube in specific, in particular?

 

Nathan Holbert:

My kid, specifically my son, but my daughter as well will just completely not intentionally stumble upon some really radicalizing content, and then suddenly they'll start having these crazy ideas that I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on here?" This is a genuine fear that I have as a parent.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Which is legitimate.

 

Nathan Holbert:

It's a legitimate fear. Because of that, it is reasonable ... air quotes for the listening audience ... for me to think I need to figure out a way to control this. So, that's what I think a lot of this comes down to. My kids are doing something, they're hearing these things at school, they're coming back saying words that I don't recognize, they're telling me about pronouns that I'm confused by, they're telling me they have a friend. These things that I don't understand because I'm an old dude, I'm afraid of. It needs to be shut down. I got to shut it down.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, so wherever they can get it from, whether it's the internet or curriculum or their friends ... You're going to shut down their friends, I guess.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I guess so.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Because that's where they're getting a lot of information.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Shut it down!

 

Haeny Yoon:

Shut it down, yeah. But I think you point out a very reasonable fear that a lot of parents have because I think to play devil's advocate, you're not necessarily advocating that parents just let their kids be free range-

 

Nathan Holbert:

Right. No, totally, yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

... and just run around and do whatever they want.

 

Nathan Holbert:

But my kids mostly are.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Or that parents don't or should not care, or I don't know. So, how do you navigate that conversation or discussion? Parents do have a legitimate responsibility and accountability to their kids, and they obviously have reasonable fears that are not necessarily unfounded. But then at the same time, you're trying to navigate that with agency and freedom and the right for children to critically understand the world and to think about the world. It's like James Baldwin's badass statement many, many years ago. Sometimes we designed school in a way that we don't want a critically engaged citizenry. We just want people to follow.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yep, yep, yep.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Maybe I answered my own question there, but how do you navigate that or think about that? As a parent, how do you square that?

 

Nathan Holbert:

The jury's still out. My kids have many years I imagine left to evolve and develop.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Many years to find out if you mess them up.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Who knows how badly I've screwed up? Yeah, I do think this fear is legitimate in many ways. You spend so much time when they're little just controlling their environment to keep them safe. For better or worse, that's how it works in the U.S. Then you get to this moment where they're of an age where they go to school, they go to the internet, they go to other places, and they get exposed to things that you are not controlling, so I think that fear is real.

But I think it comes down to trust. It comes down to having some faith that the work that you put into controlling that environment or teaching your kids about what's right and what's wrong and what's safe and what's unsafe, putting some faith that they'll be able to then put that into action. That's super, super scary to do as a parent, but it's really important. So, you trust that when you send them to school, they're going to be exposed to things that you didn't explicitly prepare them before because you didn't know it existed, perhaps, but that their awareness of the kind of person that they've become is capable of making decisions about what's appropriate, what's not appropriate. Then also importantly checking up with them a lot, having conversations with your kids.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, I think what you said about the exposure is actually really important and can also be a very positive thing. I think we think about kids getting exposed to negative things outside of your home, but I also feel like this idea that you grow up insular, only exposed to things that you know, can be a really dangerous path when you don't have experiences outside of your own, when you don't read books that have to do with other people's experiences, where curriculum only reflects your own ideas or ideologies, or when your group of friends that you hang out with in the classroom or the people that you see are only tied to your identity politics or tied to whatever the things that you agree with. It's like that's a very dangerous and narrow road to go down, and we all know ... Not we all know, but let's just be clear here.

 

Nathan Holbert:

We all know.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, let's be clear that parents' rights are also very coded white, middle-class.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yes.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Okay, it's not right or it's not acceptable to say, let's try to indoctrinate kids with white, middle-class values. I think we all-

 

Nathan Holbert:

If you said that, that would be bad.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, some of us are politically correct about that and don't try to say things like that. But I feel like the way that people who think that say that sometimes is to say that parents have rights too, and that parents' rights are a code word for white, middle-class values, and I think that could be also a very dangerous path that we ride.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I'm trying to not spin this out into 17 different directions, which is very tempting to do because it's all tied together with ... yeah. I think you're 100% right. I think there's ways in which this framing gets used as a cudgel to not just say what I should be able to do or what my kids should be able to do, but to your point, to dictate what all the kids around my kid have to deal with, and that's really not how a society should function.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, yeah. Let's be clear, just because you are an expert in your own kids' lives, which hopefully you are if you are a parent, but doesn't make you an expert on all kids. I think that's the underlying root of it, is that parents' rights assume that this parent who is enacting their right knows what's good for all kids just because you're a parent. It goes back to the childless cat lady thing where if you're not a parent, then you don't know anything about how children should develop or think about. And I take offense to that being not a parent. So let's zoom out here. What is the bigger issue that you see here? What is beyond parental control, beyond parental fears, beyond trying to make sure that your ideology wins over someone else's, what's the larger issue, you think?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Well, as I said before, I think a lot of this has to do with fear, and I think a lot of it has to do with control. I think those are hard things to deal with as a human, and they're hard to deal with as a parent because you are feeling them about this other entity that you've cared for and loved for so long. But I think a lot of this has to do with taking children seriously and taking their agency seriously. Instead of talking about parents' rights, why aren't we talking about youths' agency?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, yeah, exactly because I feel like we're so used to just using kids for our benefit. I'm not trying to judge anybody here, but I think that when we say parents' rights or even when we talk politics, we like to talk about kids in relation to that because who's going to be like, "I hate kids, and I don't want anything for them"? Everybody tries to say, "I'm doing right by the kids," or I feel like it's a very bipartisan thing to be for the children, for the sake of the kids.

 

Nathan Holbert:

No child left behind.

 

Haeny Yoon:

No child left behind. Woof.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That hits right in the twenty-year-old.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, but I think it's like we use kids a lot to mobilize our political agenda, and I think the parental rights movement too is also a political agenda. I think that happens all the time like in political campaigns. It happens all the time in politics, whether you're a Democrat or Republican in conventions and speeches. They always talk about children, and they have sad pictures of children, and they are like, "Look at this child who's going to grow up blank?" Instead of that, I feel like missing from that is actually what children think or actually, what is good for them or what they have said to us about what they would like to do and how they would like to be in this world.

So, I think it's really an issue of larger power dynamics and politics and just what we think about kids in general. We think about them as accessories.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, for our own ends, yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, yeah.

 

Nathan Holbert:

You, as the expert of the expert to talk to children ... No, that's true. That's true. In fact, we were interviewing a couple of kids just the other day, and I was like, "Thank God you're here, Haeny." As the experts about talking to children, what do you suggest? How should we be thinking about this?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. I won't call myself an expert, but I have thought about it a lot, and I think part of it is just taking kids seriously beyond the things that benefit us, beyond our ideal of what we think children should be like. An example is politics, let's say. We often in the media or just at school, even when we teach them a unit on being social justice advocates or being political, we give them these examples of people who have been first like "Martin Luther King gave a speech, and he had a dream, and look what he did," or "Jackie Robinson was the first Black baseball player. Look what he did." It's like if I was a kid, I would be like, "Hm, I don't know."

 

Nathan Holbert:

I'm going to go back to my video games.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I might've gotten first place on Mario Kart. Does that count for something?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Basically the same thing.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Do I get a Purple Heart for that? But it's like we give them these unreasonable demands on how they can enact citizenship and how they can be political and how they enact power. I feel like we don't take seriously the everyday things that give them a chance to just be. So, I think sometimes whether they have a show that they really like or they want to talk about a stuffie that is their favorite, or they want to play a game that you absolutely hate, or they are really into and know so much about Star Wars or Deadpool or something. Why don't we take that seriously? Because we see it as frivolous. We don't see it as important when it could be very important to their daily lives.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Play serious, interesting.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Being able to pay attention to that stuff isn't just about building a relationship with your young person in your life, which it is that, but it's not just about that. It's also through those topics, through those conversations, through those engagements that they begin also trusting you. They begin also talking to you about other things that are going on in their lives. I know my son is very closed off sometimes whenever I'm asking about his school work because it's like, "Ugh, Dad."

 

Haeny Yoon:

It's such a pointed question too. It's like, come on.

 

Nathan Holbert:

"It's so annoying, Dad." But when we talk about a video game, he'll talk to me for extended amounts of time about the nuance of these games. And through that, I'm able to ask follow-up questions that can be connectors to other topics and other things like, "Oh, do any of your friends play that? Oh, cool. Which ones?" Then I start to get to know who his friends are.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a way like, oh, my gosh, we can get to know kids by getting to know their interests, and then we can also get to know them at the same time. Miracle!

 

Nathan Holbert:

Radical. Absolutely, radical.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Radical. Should we end with that very radical thought?

 

Nathan Holbert:

I think we should. I think that's the perfect way to wrap this.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Well, hopefully, you've been enjoying these brief episodes that we've been releasing as we prepare for season five. We're really excited to share that with you. Before you leave though, please take a moment. We have a survey up in our show notes. Tell us about what you're enjoying about the podcast, what you'd like to see more of, suggested guests, or some topics we'd love to hear it.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Please remember also to leave us a review or just even give us a rating as that will help circulate the podcast.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Five stars.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Five stars.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Five stars.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Smash that five-star button.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Smash it with your fist.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes.

 

Nathan Holbert:

If you know somebody who you think would enjoy Pop & Play, please share it with them. Please share this episode, share any of the other episodes. We have our best of suggested listening lists now that we've been doing this for a few seasons. Try that out.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, don't forget to follow us on popandplaypod on Instagram.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I think that's enough.

 

Haeny Yoon:

All right. See you later.

 

Nathan Holbert:

All right, bye.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Bye.