“For Their Benefit”: The Lost History of Parental Consent and Minors’ Rights

The principle of parental involvement is nonpartisan: Red and blue states agree that parents should generally be involved in the lives of their children. Meanwhile, the goal of children’s well-being—which may sometimes be at odds with parental involvement—has become a touchstone for legal reform efforts across a variety of domains. The embrace of both the goals of children’s well-being and parents’ rights to be involved in decision-making regarding their children conceals deeply contested questions about when, why, and how the law should require parental consent of minors’ decisions. Drawing on archival material housed at six different universities, we make sense of present-day conflicts about parental approval by revisiting the long legal history of parental involvement, from early common law cases to struggles of the civil rights era. Building on a rich literature on child well-being, we then use lessons from this history to construct a framework for determining when legislators and judges today should require parental involvement and when minors should be allowed to make their own decisions.