Self-Determination Through Children’s Rights: Resisting the Paradoxical Pretext of Parents’ Rights Legislation

Abstract: Washington state law balances the interests of parents and the state in education, healthcare, and the general wellbeing of children. Despite the fact that children are at the center of emerging controversies, children’s rights are rarely discussed in state legislation debating the obligations and relationships between the state of Washington and parents. In education, for example, RCW 28A.605.005 finds “[p]arents are the primary stakeholders in their children’s upbringing.” While this may be true relative to the state, it overlooks the fact that children are the primary actors, agents, and rights bearers in their own personhood. This Article therefore considers ongoing public debates and legislation over parental rights of notification and control in education and healthcare under Washington state law, reframing these issues through the rights of children. State law provides a key vehicle for codifying, protecting, and even constitutionalizing the rights of everyone within the state, and this Article considers how state law could embrace a children’s rights framework to ensure self-determination for all marginalized populations. In balancing the interests of the state and parents, children are the fulcrum—the center point of the balance in weighing the two interests. Strengthening the fulcrum ensures both that the state and parents’ interests can be adequately weighed and considered, and that children’s rights and self-determination are protected in our understandings of the law through legislation and judicial frameworks. Emphasizing the rights of children—recognizing both their power and precarity without exploitation or subordination—creates conditions for the protection of all persons in the present and for the future.