PERSPECTIVE ON CHILDREN : Coming Between Parent and Child : Some parents <i> do</i> hurt their children. That risk is threatening enough to welcome laws as checks on parental power.

Should children have rights? In particular, should children have a right to sue their parents or a right to make medical or educational decisions on their own? Lately these questions have fueled debates over a few sentences written years ago by the wife of a 1992 presidential candidate. These issues also animate my course in family law, my own scholarship and my late-night musings as a new mother. In fact, my newly acquired perspective as a mother gives me pause about many scholarly positions, and about claims by Hillary Clinton, and others, that children should have rights.

It’s not the vivid encounter with a totally dependent being that makes me question rights for children. We lawyers have not shied away from the language of rights for people who cannot speak, people who are comatose or severely disabled, just as we have not refrained from according rights to corporations and other artificial “persons.” In these situations, rights provide the baseline for conversations, arguments and negotiations. Rights establish boundaries and bargaining chips where otherwise sheer power might prevail.

The idea of rights for a child seems no more ridiculous to me than a bank account for a child; both will have to be established, exercised and monitored by adults but both in the most critical sense belong to the child.

My doubts arise from the barely articulable but fierce resistance I have to anyone interfering with my care for my child. The idea that someone else--and most worrisome, some stranger--could tell me how to raise my child is even more disturbing than all the strangers who dared to touch my pregnant belly. I can hardly stand to let my daughter out of my arms, much less out of my orbit of care. I do not trust those beyond my immediate sphere of family and friends to know and understand her, much less to cherish her and shield her from harm.

It is at this point in my reflections, though, that I hear the echoes of a parent’s shout aimed at me a decade ago when I served as a court-appointed advocate for her child in a custody investigation. “Just wait until you have a child of your own,” she leveled as if it were a curse. “Then you’ll know how wrong it is for you to come in and stand between me and my child.” The comment stung, and it reverberates now that I have my own child. Yes, it would be painful to have to deal with anyone elseclaiming to stand up for my child and especially to stand against me. And if that someone else is a government official, a bureaucrat or a social worker, my comfort level does not increase.

Yet some parents do abuse their children. Some parents expose their children to dangers with irreversible consequences; some deny their kids medical care critical to their well-being. And other adults--including state officials--may inflict violence on children. Rights represent enforceable protection.

So I do not oppose the decision by the Florida court granting a 12-year-old child the right to initiate a lawsuit against parents who failed to care for him and then prevented his adoption (on Friday the suit was decided in favor of the child--a judge ruled that the boy could be adopted by his foster parents). Nor do I disagree with the Supreme Court and the state courts that have announced rights for children in judicial procedure, free speech, education and medical treatment.

But perhaps anyone concerned about these issues should give an honest read to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 1973 and ’79 essays on children’s rights. She questioned the ability of governments to provide adequate or effective programs for children. She emphasized that many rights of children really refer to the needs of children whose parents overtly put medical care and other services beyond their means. She explored how children’s rights necessarily involve relationships between children and adults and inevitably depend on adults for assertion, enforcement and responsibility.

There is a profound kernel of insight here: Children’s rights represent not their autonomy but their connection with others; not their isolation but their membership in a community and connection with others who care about them. If their rights cut into parents’ autonomy, perhaps that is because some parents, left alone, hurt their children. That risk is threatening enough that all should welcome a system that checks parental power.

Even I, with my fierce resistance to interference with my child, have come to face this basic truth: My responsibilities to my child include living under a system of laws that assure her more than me. If I fail her, the society--through laws and customs--will step in.