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The Morality of “Sharenting”

black-and-white photograph of embarrassed child

The cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind — featuring a naked baby diving after a dollar bill in a pool of brilliant, blue water — is one of the most iconic of the grunge era, and perhaps of the ‘90s. But not everyone looks back on that album with fond nostalgia. Just last week, Spencer Elden — the man pictured as the baby on that cover — renewed his lawsuit against Nirvana, citing claims of child pornography.

Cases like this are nothing new. Concerns regarding the exploitation of children in the entertainment industry have existed for, well, as long as the entertainment industry. What is new, however, is the way in which similar concerns might be raised for non-celebrity children. The advent of social media means that the public sharing of images and videos of children is no longer limited to Hollywood. Every parent with an Instagram account is capable of doing this. The practice even has a name: sharenting. Indeed, those currently entering adulthood are unique in that they are the first generation to have had their entire childhoods shared online — and some of them aren’t very happy about it. So it’s worth asking the question: is it morally acceptable to share imagery of children online before they can give their informed consent?

One common answer to this question is to say that it’s simply up to the parent or guardian. This might be summed up as the “my child, my choice” approach. Roughly, it relies on the idea that parents know what is in the best interests of their child, and therefore reserve the right to make all manner of decisions on their behalf. As long as parental consent is involved whenever an image or video of their child is shared, there’s nothing to be concerned about. It’s a tempting argument, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Being a parent doesn’t provide you with the prerogative to do whatever you want with your child. We wouldn’t, for example, allow parental consent as a justification for child labor or sex trafficking. If every parent did know what was best for their child, there wouldn’t be a need for institutions like the Child Protection Service. Child abuse and neglect wouldn’t exist. But they do. And that’s because sometimes parents get things wrong. The “my child, my choice” argument, then, is not a good one. So we must look for an alternative.

We might instead take a “consequentialist” approach — that is, to weigh up the good consequences and bad consequences of sharenting to see if it results in a net good. To be fair, there are many good things that come from the practice. For one, social media provides an opportunity for parents to share details of a very important part — perhaps the most important part — of their lives. In doing so, they are able to strengthen their relationships with family, friends, and other parents, bonding with — and learning from — each other along the way. Such sharing also enables geographically distant loved ones to be more involved in a child’s life. This is something that’s become even more important in a world that has undergone unprecedented travel restrictions as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the mere existence of these benefits is not enough to justify sharenting. They must be weighed against the actual and potential harms of the practice. And there are many. Sharing anything online — especially imagery of young children — is an enormously risky endeavor. Even images that are shared under supposedly private conditions can easily enter the public forum — either through irresponsible resharing by well-intentioned loved ones, or by the notoriously irresponsible management of our data by social media companies.

Once this imagery is in the public domain, it can be used for all kinds of nefarious purposes. But we needn’t explore such dark avenues. Many of us have a lively sense of our own privacy, and don’t want our information shared with the general public regardless of how it ends up being used. It makes sense to imagine that our children — once capable of giving informed consent — will feel the same way. Much of the imagery shared of them online involves private, personal moments intended only for themselves and those they care about. Any invasion of that privacy is a bad thing.

Which brings us to yet another way of analyzing this subject. Instead of focusing purely on the consequences of sharenting, we might instead apply what’s referred to as a “deontological” approach. One of the most famous proponents of deontology was Immanuel Kant. In its most straight-forward formulation, Kant’s ethical theory tells us to always seek to treat others as an end in themselves, not as a means to some other end. This approach reveres respect for the autonomy of others, and abhors using people for your own purposes. Thus, even if there are goods to be gained from sharenting, these should be ignored if the child — upon developing their autonomy — would wish that their private lives had never been made public.

What both the consequentialist approach and the deontological approach seem to boil down to, then, is a question of what the child will want once they are capable of giving informed consent. And this is something we can never know. They may develop into a gregarious braggart who shares every detail of their life online. But they may just as likely turn into a fiercely private individual who wants no record of their childhood — awkward and embarrassing as these always tend to be — in the digital ether. Given this uncertainty, what should parents do? It’s difficult to say, but perhaps the safest approach might be to apply some kind of “precautionary principle.” This principle states that where an unnecessary action brings a significant risk of harm, we should refrain from acting. So, given the potential harm associated with sharenting and the largely unnecessary nature of the practice (especially when similar goods can be achieved in other ways; for example, by mailing photographs to loved ones the old-fashioned way), we should respect our children’s right to privacy — at least until they can give their informed consent to having their private lives shared publicly.

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Conservatorships and the Problem of Possessing People

photograph of legal consultation with one party pausing over contract

For the second time in recent years, conservatorships are in the news. Like the many articles discussing Britney Spears’s, these accounts often highlight the ways the conservatorship system can be abused. News outlets focus on abuse for good reason, there are over 1.3 million people in conservatorship/guardianship in the United States, and those in such a position are far too often taken advantage of.

But there are other ethical concerns with conservatorship beyond exploitation. Even when a conservator is totally scrupulous and motivated merely by the good of their conservatee, there is still something ethically troubling about any adult have the right to make decisions for another. As Robert Dinerstein puts it, even when conservatorship “is functioning as intended it evokes a kind of ‘civil death’ for the individual, who is no longer permitted to participate in society without mediation through the actions of another.”

So, what is the moral logic underlying the conservatorship relationship? What are the conditions under which, even in principle, one should be able to make decisions for another person; and how exactly should we understand that kind of relationship? These are the questions I want to address in this post.

So What Is a Conservatorship?

Tribb Grebe, in his excellent explain piece, defines a conservatorship as “a court-approved arrangement in which a person or organization is appointed by a judge to take care of the finances and well-being of an adult whom a judge has deemed to be unable to manage his or her life.”

(You may sometimes hear conservatorships referred to as guardianship. Both the terms ‘conservatorship’ and ‘guardian’ are terms defined by legal statue, and while they usually mean slightly different things, what they mean depends on which state you are in. In Florida, a conservatorship is basically a guardianship where the person is ‘absent’ rather than merely incapacitated or a minor, while in other states a conservator and guardian might have slightly different legal powers, or one term might be used for adults and the other for minors. For most purposes, then, we can treat the two terms as synonymous.)

A conservatorship is, therefore, an unusual moral relationship. Normally, if I spend someone else’s money, then I am a thief. Normally, I need to consent before a surgeon can operate on me. — no one else has the power to consent for me.

Or at least, conservatorship is an unusual relationship between two adults. It is actually the ordinary relationship between parents and children. If a surgeon wants to operate on a child, the surgeon needs the permission of the parents, not of the child. A parent has the legal right to spend their child’s money, as they see fit, for the child’s good. Conservatorship is, essentially, an extension of the logic of the parent-child relationship. To understand conservatorship, then, it will be useful to keep this moral relationship in mind.

Parents, Children, and Status

My favorite accounts of the moral relationship between parents and children is given by Immanuel Kant in his book The Metaphysics of Morals. Kant divides up the rights we have to things outside ourselves into three categories: property, contract, and status. Arthur Ripstein introduces these categories this way: “Property concerns rights to things; contract, rights against persons; and status contains rights to persons “akin to” rights to things.”

Let’s try to break those down more clearly.

Property concerns rights to things. For example, I have a property right over my laptop. I don’t need to get anyone else’s permission to use my laptop, and anyone else who wanted to use it would have to first get my permission.

There are two essential parts to property: possession and use.

Possession means something like control. I can open up my laptop, turn it on, plug it in, etc. I can exercise some degree of control over what happens to my laptop. If I could not, if my laptop were instantly and irrevocably teleported to the other end of the universe, I could not have a property interest in the laptop any longer. I would no longer have possession, even in an extended sense.

Use, in contrast, means that I have the right to employ the laptop for my purposes. Not only do I have some control over the laptop, I can also exercise that control most anyway I want. I can surf the web, I can type up a Prindle Post, or I can even destroy my laptop with a hammer.

Use is why my laptop is mine, even if you are in current control of it.  If I ask you to watch my laptop while I go to the bathroom, then you have control of the computer, but you don’t have use of it. You don’t have the right to use the computer for whatever purpose you want. If you destroy the laptop while I’m away, then, you committed and injustice against me.

Contract involves rights to other people. If you agree to mow my lawn for twenty dollars, then I have a right that you mow my law. This does not mean that I have possession of you. You are a free person; you remain in control of your actions. So, in contract I have use of you, but not possession of you. I have a right that you do something for my end (mowing my lawn), but I am not in control of you even at that point. I cannot, for instance, take over your mind and guide your actions to force you to mow my lawn (even though I have a right that you mow my lawn).

This is one way in which contract is unlike slavery. A slaveowner does not just claim the use of their slave. They also claim control over the slave. In a slave relationship, the slave is no longer their own master, and so is not understood to have possession of their own life.

Of course, another difference between contract and slavery is that contract is consensual. But that is not the only difference. If the difference were simply that slavery was not consensual, then in principle slavery would be okay if someone agrees to become a slave. But Kant rejected that thought. Kant argued that a slavery contract was illegitimate, even if the slave had originally consented.

Status is the final relation of right, and it is status that Kant thinks characterizes parents and children. According to Kant, status is the inverse of contract. In contract, I have the use, but not the possession, of someone else. In status, I have the possession of another but not use.

What could that mean?

Remember that t to have possession of someone is to have a certain control over them. Parents have control over the lives of their children. Parents can, for instance, spend their children’s money, and parents can force their children to behave in certain ways. Not only that, but parents can do this without the consent of their children. These relationships of status, then, are very different from relations of contract.

But then why isn’t a parent’s control over their child akin to slavery?

To distinguish relations of slavery from relations of status, we need to attend to the second half of a status relationship. Parents have possession of their children, but they do not have the use of their children.

Let’s look at the example of money first. Parents have possession and use of their own money. That means parents controls their own money and have the right to spend it however they want. In contrast, parents have the possession, but not the use, of their children’s money. That means that while parents can control their own money, they cannot just spend it however the parent wants. Instead, parents can only spend the money for the good of the child. While I can give my own money away for no reason, I cannot give my child’s money away for no reason.

Parents have a huge amount of control over their children’s lives. However, Kant thinks that parents can only rightly use that control on behalf of their children. This does not mean that parents cannot require their children to perform chores. But it does mean that the reason parents must assign chores has to be for the moral development of the child. Kant was critical, for instance, of people who had children just so that they would have extra hands to help with work on a family farm. Because children cannot consent to the control that parents have, therefore, parents wrong their children if they ever use that control for their own good as opposed to the good of the child.

The Fiduciary Requirement

Parents, then, act as a kind of trustee of their child’s life; they are a fiduciary. The word ‘fiduciary’ is a legal word, which describes “a person who is required to act for the benefit of another person on all matters within the scope of their relationship.” As Arthur Ripstein notes, the fiduciary relationship is structurally parallel to the parental relationship.

“The legal relation between a fiduciary and a beneficiary is one such case. Where the beneficiary is not in a position to consent (or decline to consent), or the inherent inequality or vulnerability of the relationship makes consent necessarily problematic, the fiduciary must act exclusively for the benefit of the beneficiary. It is easier for the fiduciary to repudiate the entire relationship by resigning than for a parent to repudiate a relationship with a child. But from the point of view of external freedom the structure is exactly the same: one party may not enlist the other, or the other’s assets, in support of ends that the other does not share.”

This is a powerful explanatory idea, and recognizing these fiduciary relationships helps us explain various forms of injustice. For example, since in a fiduciary relationship one is only supposed to act for the good of a trustee, this can be used to explain what is unjust about insider trading. If I use my position in a company to privately enrich myself, then I am abusing my office in the company. The private knowledge I have as an employee is available to me for managing the affairs of the company. To use that knowledge for private gain is to unjustly use the property of someone else.

This relationship can also help us understand political corruption. The reason it is unjust for presidents to use their office to enrich themselves, is because their presidential powers are given for public use for the sake of the nation. To manage the government for private purposes is to unjustly mismanage the resources entrusted to the president by the people.

Why Status

But even if we know the sort of relationship that obtains between parents and children — a type of fiduciary relationship — we still need to know why such a relationship is justified. After all, I can’t take control of your life, even if I use that control for your own good. I can’t do so even if I am wiser than you and would make better decisions than you would yourself. Because your life is your own, you have possession of your own life, not matter how much happier you would be if I took control.

The reason why parents have possession of their children is not that parents are wiser or smarter than their kids. Instead, it is because Kant thinks that children are not yet fully developed persons. Children because of the imperfect and still developing position in which they find themselves, are not able to be in full control of themselves (for a nice defense of this view of children see this article by Tamar Schapiro). Of course, the legal relationships here are crude. It is not as though the moment someone turns 18 they instantly pass the threshold of full moral personhood. Growing up is a messy process, and this is why parents should give children more and more control as they mature and develop.

Conservatorship

And just as the messiness of human development means that people should often have some control over their lives before they reach the age of 18, so too that messiness means that sometimes people must lose some control over even after they reach adulthood.

Just as children are not fully developed moral persons, so someone with Alzheimer’s is not a fully developed moral person. We appoint a conservator over someone with Alzheimer’s not because the conservator will make better choices, but because people with Alzheimer’s are often incapable of making fully developed decisions for themselves.

This, then, is the basic moral notion of conservatorship. A conservator has possession but not use of their charge. They can make decisions on their behalf, but those decisions have to be made for the charge’s good. And such a relationship is justified when someone is unable to be a fully autonomous decision-maker, because in some way their own moral personhood is imperfect or damaged.

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Re-Examining Scared Straight Programs

photograph of teen boy confined behind chain link fence

In the United States, summer camps for kids across the nation make up a $4 billion dollar industry. However, not all summer camps are designed to be fun. “Scared Straight” programs are designed to deter at-risk youth by forcing them into an exaggeratedly violent and threatening prison setting for 1-3 days. The purpose of these programs is to encourage children to change their actions which could eventually lead to adult conviction. Parents voluntarily pay for their children to be sent to these programs, a decision which some child psychologists have labeled as “child abuse.”

Are prison camps for kids ethical? Is it right to use fear to elicit a change in behavior? Are there certain disciplinary tactics which should be off-limits to parents?

Public awareness of these camps first began with the documentary “Scared Straight!” which aired in 1978, and won an Emmy and Academy Award for its depiction of children sent to prison camps. Awareness increased due to the A&E TV series “Beyond Scared Straight” which documented the experiences of children in prison camp programs for 9 seasons. Most recently, Vice ran a mini-documentary feature in 2018, which contained highly disturbing footage. One of the most documented “scared straight” prison camps for kids in the U.S. is “Project STORM,” a camp based in North Carolina, whose existence is predicated on the belief that “punishment and fear (i.e. getting tough on crime), is one approach to reducing juvenile crime.” Participation in the program costs between $75-100 and lasts 12 hours, including an overnight stay.

While many would agree there is some utility in allowing parents agency over personal parenting decisions, where should the line between children’s rights and parental discipline lie? One place to turn for answers might lie in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international agreement with 140 signatory countries, including the U.S. who has signed but failed to ratify. The Convention recognizes 40 rights that children are entitled to, including protection from abuse and violence as well as the prioritization of their best interests by parents and governments. Though the Convention does not define abuse and violence, child abuse is defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as ”any recent act…on the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse, or exploitation.” Studies have shown that certain forms of punishment, such as corporal punishment, negatively impact the emotional and physical well-being of children. With this in mind, it is clear that any program which uses physical and emotional violence, or the threat of violence, against children would be widely recognized as immoral in violating the rights of children. It is also hard to justify “scared straight” programs even from a consequentialist perspective. The American Psychological Association maintains that physical discipline is ineffective as well as harmful. In fact, Scared Straight programs have been found to actually increase the likelihood of criminal conviction for children who partake in them.

However, even if such camps appear to violate the rights of children, do the rights of parents to choose their own disciplinary methods present an irresolvable tension? Legally, parents have the right to exercise “reasonable force or reasonable punishments on their child to control, train, and educate.” This right is often referred to as the “parental discipline privilege.” While many states recognize this right as a defense during allegations of child abuse, the legality of an action does not necessarily make it moral. However, there is some utility in generally allowing parental autonomy in raising children. After all, parents often know their children better than anyone else, and therefore are the most qualified to make disciplinary decisions which will be simultaneously effective and appropriate to the child’s temperament. Additionally, giving parents more autonomy may lead to better outcomes for children, as some advocates claim. Parents who feel criticized or judged may also be more likely to react harshly to their child’s misbehavior due to embarrassment.

It’s also worth examining whether the moral culpability of parents rides partially on their motivation. The decision to send one’s child into a Scared Straight program might be the best decision a parent believes they can make, or they might see it as a last resort to teach their children to stay out of trouble. Parents who turn to these programs may feel they do not have the time, money, or energy to invest in helping their children make better decisions, so they rely on fear as a remedy. While generally ineffective and arguably abusive, parents who believe the promises of Scared Straight programs may ultimately be making a decision which they believe is ultimately positive for the child. For example, a single-parent trying to make ends meet, whose child has been expelled might believe that the program is the most manageable option for helping their child choose a different path. While parents who send their children to such programs for minor problems or who have historically abused their child, might be less excusable in their decision. Whether or not one believes that even well-intentioned parents should know better is likely the determining factor in whether or not one believes parents are fully culpable for the immoral and inhumane treatment of children in these programs.

Turning to Scared Straight programs themselves, is using fear as a method to elicit “positive” behavioral changes okay? If the programs were indeed highly effective, one might argue that the cost of such deterrence is worth the benefits. Incarceration has severely negative impacts on an individual, and some might believe that one traumatic weekend at a scared straight program is well-worth it. On the other hand, perhaps it is never okay to use such methods, as they are irreconcilably wrong in themselves. The use of fear to elicit or deter certain behaviors is highly debated within the psychological and sociological fields. “Fear appeal,” as it is often referred to, is “a persuasive message that attempts to arouse fear in order to divert behavior through the threat of impending danger or harm. Though the concept of fear appeal is commonly used in public health and marketing-based settings, this strategy is also clearly present in Scared Straight programs which use extreme, and arguably exaggerated circumstances of prison, to encourage kids to do everything they can to avoid criminal prosecution. This overload of fear might be the reason for its ineffectiveness as studies have found that extreme fear can effectively shut down the subject and may even lead to risk denial for those especially susceptible to the threat. If one believes that effective use of fear which leads to positive outcomes is justified, then the moral problem with Scared Straight programs is their ineffectiveness. On the other hand, if one believes that no matter the outcomes, the violent and threatening methods employed by these programs are wrong in itself, the most ethical answer is to simply abolish the programs altogether.

Parents are not only the main legal guardians of their children, but also the protector of their rights. Sometimes, parents make decisions which they believe will benefit the child, but lead to more harm than good. It is clear that Scared Straight programs which mentally and physically torment children have severely negative impacts on children and are highly ineffective. Until they are fundamentally reformed or ultimately abolished, they will likely continue to motivate shocking documentaries and critical exposes.

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Is Prenatal Sex Discernment Unethical?

On Saturday September 5, a gender-reveal party gone-wrong set fire to a California forest, burning down thousands of acres over the following week. This is not the first time a gender-reveal party has led to a major wildfire, nor is it the first time one has been responsible for threatening human life. Gender-reveal parties are largely a product of 20th century natal care medical advancement. The El Dorado fire has renewed debates around gender-reveal parties and the ethical questions that surround them.

Does prenatal sex discernment do more harm than good? Should gender-reveal parties be banned? And what value is there, if any, in determining sex before birth?

While there is evidence that humans have attempted to predict the gender of an unborn fetus for thousands of years, the integration of ultrasound technology into prenatal care in the 1960’s radically improved the accuracy of predicting fetal gender. Typically, gender is determined using an obstetric ultrasonography which can be up to 98%-100% accurate.

The practice of determining a child’s sex before birth is relatively uncontroversial in the United States, but it has been banned in parts of the world where this information has been used to initiate abortion. Because of women’s economic marginalization and lack of socioeconomic mobility, in some places girls are considered an economic burden compared to boys. The preference for boy babies has led to sex-selective abortion and an imbalance in the sex ratio in countries such as India and China. Studies have found that an imbalance in sex ratio favoring males, has been correlated with many other social problems such as human trafficking and an increase in violence against women. In order to combat these rising sex ratios both India and China have previously banned, or severely limited, the practice prenatal sex discernment. Despite these attempts to discourage sex-selective abortions, there still exist many concerns that regulations have not gone far enough.

Prenatal discernment in the United States has not led to sex selective abortion in the way it has in the rest of the world, but it has become a cornerstone of the pregnancy process. In a 2001 study of expectant parents, more than half of both men and women expressed a desire to know the sex of the fetus. Interestingly, researchers also found that there were sharp differences in desire to know the sex of a fetus across ethnicity, age, race, and marital status indicating that at least some of our desire to know the sex of our child comes from cultural or social influences.

While knowing the sex of a fetus does not mean a parent will necessarily have a gender reveal party, gender reveal parties certainly necessitate prenatal discernment. In the 2010’s gender reveal parties in the United States have become strikingly common. Pregnant women and their partners perform some type of ceremony in which gendered objects or colors are revealed to indicate whether the child will be male or female. This practice might seem strange to many, considering the fact that the medical process in determining the sex of the child is medical and very private in many cases.

But the point of gender-reveal parties is not simply to find out the gender of a future child, but in many cases, as Lindsey King-Miller of Vox describes, “to make a spectacle…like all kinds of social media challenges, gender reveals are made to be recorded.” By their very nature, these spectacles often involve pyrotechnics, complicated machinery, and other forms of entertainment more commonly found at an amusement park rather than one’s backyard. Perhaps this is why gender reveal parties have led to so much destruction in modern history, with critics such as Arwa Mahdawi arguing that “gender reveal parties are a form of domestic terrorism.”

The practice of gender-reveal parties has clearly led to many negative and unethical consequences. However, this is not the only reason that many find them to be morally abhorrent. Critics argue that at their core, gender-reveal parties perpetuate sexism and transphobia, exclude intersex people, and contribute to our relentless obsession with defining people within a gender binary. These parties are often rife with gender stereotypes, with themes like “Touchdowns or Tutus.” Gender-reveals also fail to acknowledge the crucial distinction between gender and sex. As psychologist Daniel L. Carson explains, “Gender is the social, behavioral, and psychological characteristics that we use to distinguish the sexes…By definition, parents have no idea what the gender of their child will be since they have yet to interact with the child.” The distinction between gender and sex has been recognized by Western sociologists, medical professionals and psychologists since at least 1987, with the establishment of “Gender and Society” and the publication of the groundbreaking article, “Doing Gender.” Today, the World Health Organization defines gender as “characteristics of women and men that are largely socially created” while sex on the other hand is “encompasses [differences] that are biologically determined.” This difference is important in understanding both the ways in which our experience of the world is impacted by our biology as well as by social stereotypes associated with our gender. It is also crucial to recognize this difference to acknowledge that not all who are biologically male or female identify with the “corresponding”, or cis, gender. Recognizing and honoring this difference is imperative for ensuring the rights of transgender, genderqueer, and non-binary people. Choosing to undergo prenatal sex discernment or host a gender-reveal party does not necessarily mean one does not understand or support the difference between sex and gender. However, it could be indicative of one’s overall attitudes toward those different from them, and toward stereotypes associated with sex and gender in general. A 2014 study, for example, found that those women who chose not to undergo prenatal discernment, tended to be “open to new experiences, and combine egalitarian views about the roles of men and women in society with conscientiousness.”

Gender-reveal parties are not the only form of American ritual that has been enabled by prenatal discernment. Companies, such as the Gender Reveal Game, have built an entire profit scheme around providing a platform for parents-to-be to encourage their loved ones to place bets on the sex of their child. Baby showers, a common custom where friends and family “shower” expectant parents and unborn children with gifts before birth, arguably center on goods like clothing and toys which are heavily marketed and designed to be appropriate for a baby depending on their sex. Anyone who has attended a baby shower can attest to the fact that it is much more challenging to find gender-neutral toys and clothes for expectant parents. In fact, experts have reported that children’s toys are more divided by gender now than they were 50 years ago. While some progress is being made on the front of gender-neutral children’s clothing, industry experts affirm that the vast majority remains gendered, beginning in infancy.

But is wanting to know the gender of an unborn child necessarily immoral? Some might argue not. As mentioned earlier, there were sharp divisions in parents wanting to know the sex of their child based on ethnic, racial, age, and marital status. For some, knowing the gender of one’s child before birth might be religious and traditional. Knowing a child’s gender might also help parents decide which name to give their child, depending on their cultural or religious background. Additionally, knowing the gender of a child might be a way to ease anxiety during pregnancy. It is especially important to note that in the 2001 study mentioned above, the two groups with the highest desire to know the sex of their unborn child were pregnant women below the age of 22, at 98% and single-mothers at 90%. Being pregnant at a young age, or without a partner to help raise the child undoubtedly creates a lot of uncertainty. Knowing the sex of the child might be one way for these expectant mothers to ease anxiety during pregnancy.

In an article in Today’s Parent, Dave Coodin, father-to-be, explains his decision to partake in prenatal discernment. He explains both that prior to knowing the sex of his child, he and his partner referred to the baby as “it” which was rather dehumanizing. He also explained that by knowing the sex, he was able to conceptualize a part of his baby’s identity in a manner that allowed him to “construct fantasies that satisfy us in the present, no matter how crazy and deluded.” Pregnancy is certainly a long and difficult process, and some might agree with and sympathize with Dave’s desire to know at least one potential aspect of his future child’s identity. In a 2015 research paper, Florence Pasche Guignard argued that gender reveal parties have filled a role “where neither medical nor religious institutions offer ritual options deemed appropriate enough for celebrating joyfully and emotionally during pregnancy.” While there doesn’t seem to be anything inherently wrong with celebrating during a pregnancy, critics might still push back that it isn’t the celebratory nor ritualistic aspect of prenatal discernment and gender-reveals that is the problem, but rather the desire to define a human being, and a baby, based on its sex.

Regardless of what one believes about gender-reveal parties, the tide is certainly turning on emphasizing gender in children in general, with about 1 in 5 American parents supporting gender-neutral clothing. In fact, even the woman credited with starting the gender-reveal party trend back in 2008 has become a vocal critic of the phenomenon. In a viral Facebook post from 2019, Jenna Karvunidis asserted “Assigning focus on gender at birth leaves out so much of their potential and talents that have nothing to do with what’s between their legs.” In a rather ironic quip, she concluded by revealing, “PLOT TWIST, the world’s first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!”

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“Incels” and the Right to be Loved

Image of a man alone in a dark computer room

If you’re like me, you cringe when you hear the word “incel” and never use it without scare quotes. Of course, there have always been people who are involuntarily celibate, but when they band together as a named subculture, something’s seriously amiss. I’m pretty sure I’d see it that way even if there weren’t four recent cases of men venting their sexual frustration by slaughtering people—one having done so explicitly as an “incel.”

Continue reading ““Incels” and the Right to be Loved”

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Opinion: A Moral Defense of Monogamy

The Stormy Daniels affair is growing out of control for President Trump, amidst allegations of threats, extortion and hush money. The porn star has claimed that she had a sexual relationship with Trump, and it now seems that the president used funds from his political campaign (part of which comes from contributors) in order to silence her. The origin of this money (and not the payment itself, or even the adultery) is what is truly at stake, and could have further legal complications.

Continue reading “Opinion: A Moral Defense of Monogamy”

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Womb Transplantation: A Procedure in Need of Defense?

A woman viewing an ultrasound

Baylor Medical Center in Dallas recently announced a first in the US: a woman gave birth to a baby from a transplanted uterus. The procedure currently has a staggering price tag: $200,000 to $250,000.  It’s cheaper to hire a gestational surrogate to carry a baby, though still very expensive.  So it seems uterus transplantation forces women to defend their desire to give birth, as opposed to leaving the birthing to someone else.  But then, hiring a surrogate is much more expensive than adopting.  So perhaps the woman who opts for a uterus transplant also has to defend her determination to procreate instead of adopting.  In an Axios article on the “complicated ethics of uterus transplantation,” the fact that adoption is not pursued by the transplant patient is one of the main issues raised.

Continue reading “Womb Transplantation: A Procedure in Need of Defense?”

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Scotland May Ban Spanking. Should the United States?

A stereograph of a woman spanking her child.

An October 19, 2017 article in The Scotsman reported that the Scottish Government plans to implement proposals that would “remove the defence of “justifiable assault” from Scottish law, which can currently be used by parents who use corporal punishment on their children. Late last year, France also instituted a law banning the spanking of children. This made it the 52nd country to do so.

The United States is not on that list of countries. According to an NBC News report from 2014, corporal punishment is legal in all 50 US states. State statutes generally indicate that the physical punishment must be “reasonable” or “not excessive.” In addition, 19 states still allow corporal punishment in schools, as of 2014. Public opinion in the United States also widely supports spanking. The NBC News report cited a 2013 Harris Poll which found that 81 percent of Americans say “parents spanking their children is sometimes appropriate.”

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Navigating the Ethics of Hot Cars

Every year, an average of 37 children die from heatstroke as a result of having been trapped in hot vehicles. Statistically, most of these children are under the age of three. These very young children lack either the ability or the knowledge to operate car door handles or to unlock doors. Many of them die in a desperate attempt to escape from the vehicle.  This year, deaths due to children stuck in hot cars reached an all-time high for this point in the year, according to a CNN report, with 29 deaths reported so far.

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Should We Avoid or Engage Moral Dilemmas?

It is common for parents to teach their children to avoid moral danger. Parental advice includes avoiding certain peer groups, adhering to a curfew, and ensuring that responsible adult supervision is always present.  Parents tend to think that these kinds of policies make it more likely that their children won’t encounter situations in which they might make bad decisions.  

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Should Private Schools be Outlawed?

Equal opportunity weighs heavily in American views of education. Not everyone can grow up to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but who gets to be CEO should be determined principally by merit, and not according to skin color, place of birth, or family wealth. Both conservatives and liberals describe education as a driver of equal opportunity. While some may be born into poverty and others born into wealth, a well-rounded education can be the leg up that the poor child needs to compete with the rich kids. The moral case for public education rests on its ability to give everyone a shot to rise to the top.

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Should Parents Lie to Their Children About Santa Claus?

photograph of Santa Claus ornament on tree

As the parent of an inquisitive 2½ year old, I currently find myself fumbling to explain Santa Claus to him, of whom he is now quite aware. Should I emphasize that he is a storybook character and not a real person? Would he even know what the difference between real and make-believe is yet? Ultimately, I find myself confronted by the perennial parenting question that divides many a household: Should we lie to our kids about Santa Claus?

My own parents always dutifully marked some Christmas presents as if they were from Santa Claus, even well after we kids were past the stage of believing in that jolly old elf. I do not personally feel damaged by my parents sustaining the myth of Father Christmas, but a recent essay in Lancet Psychiatry warns otherwise. Kathy McKay, a clinical psychologist at the University of New England, Australia and co-author claims: “The Santa myth is such an involved lie, such a long-lasting one, between parents and children, that if a relationship is vulnerable, this may be the final straw. If parents can lie so convincingly and over such a long time, what else can they lie about?”

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The Nutritional Ethics of Hidden Vegetables

As a child, I distinctly remember sitting at my dining room table for hours and hours wishing for the tiny amount of broccoli on my almost empty plate to disappear so I could be excused from the table. If it was up to my picky self, I would have grilled cheese or pizza for every single meal, completely forgoing any sufficiently nutritious food. As for many parents, forcing me to eat fruits and vegetables became a consistent struggle throughout my entire childhood. Covering broccoli with cheese or placing vegetables in a batch of buttered noodles were just a few tactics my parents implemented in order for me to have a balanced diet.

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On Forcing Women to Share Custody with their Rapist

As the intersection of religious, political, medical, feminist, and moral debate, abortion is one of the most divisive ethical issues in our nation. Pro-choice supporters argue that women have the right to determine the fates of their own bodies whereas pro-life activists consider abortion to be murder. An issue that looms around the discussion of abortion is the circumstance of conception from rape. Pro-life individuals may shy away from the issue or even admit rape as an exception. However, websites like Students for Life advise their readers to stand firm in opposition of abortion, questioning rhetorically, “The perpetrator must be punished to the fullest extent of the law, but does the helpless child, who is guilty of no crime, deserve death?” Claiming that abortion perpetuates the “pattern of violence and victim-hood,” Students for Life suggests that the rape victim bears the responsibility to break the cycle of violence. However, does the cycle really end for the women of the estimated 17,000 to 32,000 rape-related pregnancies who choose to keep their children? Women are not only punished for their abortions; in the United States, women may be forced to share their children’s custody with their rapists.

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The Social Welfare of Child Maltreatment Prevention

Social constructs of parenting and childrearing norms change over time as the idea of the “right” or “best” way to raise a child is continually debated, such as the social acceptability of spanking. A recent article in The Atlantic titled, “Welcome to Parent College,” explores this notion and the ethical dilemmas surrounding an increasing number of classes across the U.S. that teach parents how to be parents, a little-explored corner of the healthcare realm. Triple P, the Positive Parenting Program, is the curriculum behind the parenting class at the San Francisco center. The class includes parents who have been proven or suspected of committing child abuse and have been referred by social workers, as well as those who are simply at the ends of their ropes, like those who have acknowledged their own tempers and waning patience with unruly children.

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Surrogacy and Abortion Rights

On February 18, The Atlantic’s Katie O’Reilly published an article titled, “When Parents and Surrogates Disagree on Abortion.” The article describes a messy ongoing legal battle between a pro-life surrogate carrying triplets and the soon-to-be father of these children. In January, a California woman named Melissa Cook entered into a surrogacy contract with a single Georgia man. There were three embryos created, as is frequently the case when doctors implant multiple embryos at a time to increase the chance that one will be fertilized.

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Will Genetic Screening Lead to Designer Babies?

“Designer babies.” The term has developed a stigma around the world as a result of negative sentiments toward the alteration of a fetus’ genetic makeup in order to create more favorable characteristics. The majority of genetic screening and alteration today has to do with the elimination and detection of serious diseases, not cosmetic characteristics. As technology improves, however, many people worry about how genetic screening and alteration will negatively affect the future of the human race. Discrimination, bias, and partiality are all factors that must be considered when dealing with altering an individual’s unique personal characteristics.

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Teaching Children about Tragedy

In the wake of tragedy, the issue of rhetoric often moves to the forefront of public discourse. The framing of an event and the way it is discussed has a powerful impact on public knowledge and understanding of an event and its aftermath. When it comes to situations such as these, one particularly difficult task is to cope with finding the proper rhetoric for discussing tragedies with children. Is there a “right way” to talk to children about these events?

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The Snooze Button: Should School Start Earlier?

Currently, 75-100% of public schools in 42 states have start-time earlier than 8:30 a.m. , with Louisiana leading the pack with an average school starting time of 7:40 a.m. The push for schools to adopt later starting times enters the political sphere periodically as new studies come out annually suggesting that sleep has become both a hot commodity and a scarcity for students.

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Parenting in Public: Social Media and Public Shaming

We live in a digital age in which humanity has the ability to connect in ways heretofore only imagined in science fiction. Anyone over the age of 30 has surely cringed with embarrassment as our parents shared our baby pictures with household guests. Now, parenting and parental sharing is a regular part of our online experience. Unlike those photo albums, parental posts on social media never truly go away. Backups in digital archives, cached files, or mirrors ensure that our best and worst moments are forever enshrined in some form or another, accessible to anyone with Google and a bit of patience. Social shaming and parental broadcasts of punishments are a different kind of sharing.

The suicide of Isabel Laxamana followed her father shaming her on social media and prompted a backlash of people speaking out against the ills of parental shaming. When and to what extent should parents use social media to “shame” their children? In light of what is certainly a tragedy, many parenting blogs claim that parents should never shame their children on social media. The focus of media attention has been on whether this kind of punishment is unfair for the child, but what about the challenge of parenting in the age of social media?

Parents too are brought under the microscope with every parenting decision they make. Consider the recent example of Marcy’s Diner in Portland, Maine. A couple had a small child that was crying while they waited for their food, the owner hinted several times that they might want to take the child out of the restaurant while they wait for their food, when the parents declined to do so and the child continued crying, the owner snapped and screamed at the child. Whether it’s taking a crying child out of a diner or waiting for your food in the restaurant, social media allows everyone with a smart phone or a computer connection the ability to weigh in on the proper course of action. Many people defended the restaurant owner, claiming the parents should have known better and offered advice to keep the baby quiet. Further, many labeled the child as a “brat”. Being part of an ever-growing online community means parents are now held under the microscope of countless, sometimes nameless, others who have honed in on a singular action that is now defining their life as a parent. Yet, many acts of shaming on the part of parents are voluntarily posted and shared in the blogosphere—in this way, the parents themselves are inviting the feedback, ridicule, and normative assessment of their decisions.

Parenting in public, then, takes (at least) two forms. On the one hand, there are those moments such as the Marcy’s Diner example where the public takes up a singular decision made by a parent on social media platforms. On the other hand, there are the acts of public shaming instigated by the parent(s) and shared voluntarily on social media. It seems that in the latter case that is of particular concern, since the parent is sharing the content voluntarily. What makes it worrisome are the short and long-term consequences of the post.

Parental shaming is not akin to sharing embarrassing family moments (baby bathtub photos, videos where children do something embarrassing but do not realize it, e.g.). These kinds of “shares”, which may cause mild embarrassment if uncovered by a future significant other or future coworker, will not live on in infamy.

As the colloquialism goes, it may take a village to raise a child, however online communities are no villages. They are not communities in the genuine sense of the word and the online community has an eternal, perfect memory. When a child is shamed in their neighborhood, assuming the slight is not too severe, they outgrow the infamy of the shaming (i.e., they might be teased for one week or so, but the issue eventually fades as memory does). Before a parent shames a child online, they might ask themselves a series of practical questions: Am I confident that this shame should follow my child for the next year, five years, 20 years? Do I want my child’s future boss to see this? What do I want to gain by this post; could these ends be achieved by emailing family, bringing others in the community into the conversation in a direct way? These kinds of questions will help clarify the kind of permanence that online shaming carries with it.