Is parenthood a conservatorship?

After all, it sure seems like we are supposed to do everything to benefit our children!

Remember the #FreeBritney movement? If you don’t, let me rehash this momentous event for you:

In 2008, Britney Spears’ father was legally appointed her conservator after a series of public events that convinced a judge she was too mentally incompetent to manage her finances and day-to-day tasks. Spears’ father conservatorship gave him very wide authority over Britney, allowing him to control “everything from Ms. Spears’s mental health care to where and when she can travel; the setup requires that conservators are required to submit detailed accounts of her purchases to the court — including even minor charges like $5 purchases at Sonic Drive-In or Target.”

The justification for this wide-ranging authority is intuitive: courts only appoint conservators when someone is too incompetent to manage their own affairs. And the government—acting on behalf of Ms. Spears—gave the conservatorship role to Spears’ father because it saw him as the person best suited to meet her interests. If states act appropriately, they should only grant the conservatorship for this reason alone. They would be acting out of line, for example, if Mr. Spears was not the best available conservator and wanted the role to exploit Britney financially. And apparently that’s what happened—hence the movement.

The important thing to note about these relationships is this: they are created by the government that acts on behalf of those who need them for the sole purpose of meeting the incompetent person’s interests. The government does not create these relationships to give conservators deep meaning, pleasure, entertainment, or financial freedom. As the #FreeBritney movement fiercely reminded us, the only thing that matters is the vulnerable person’s interests.

Now, does the conservator relationship—a legally created relationship where someone has authority over another incompetent person to manage her affairs—sound familiar? To some, the parent-child relationship is basically identical. For example, political philosopher James Dwyer writes:

We should […] view the state, when it creates the first legal parent-child relationships for newborn children through parentage laws, as acting in a proxy role, choosing on behalf of the child and constrained to choose […] based on the child’s best interests. Ideally, then, legal rules for parentage would place children in parent-child relationships that are, all things considered, the best ones available for them (412).

If Dwyer is correct, then the state should only grant custody to those who would best meet their child’s interests. This appears like a very fair proposal; after all, who would be cruel enough to be against such a child-centered view of parenting? Isn’t parenting all about the children?

But once we think about the view’s entailments in other cases, the view looks less attractive. For example, a biological couple who would only adequately meet their offspring’s needs has no right against another couple’s raising their children if the other couple would do a better job than the biological couple. This would mean that, in principle, severely impoverished biological parents would not have a claim to raise their children if another well-off couple would better meet their children’s needs. That seems wrong, but it appears to follow if the parent-child relationship is a legal conservatorship guided solely by the the needy person’s interests.

Also, while the idea that parenthood should be all about the child sounds nice, it does seem weird. We normally do not admire love that is too selfless in adult relationships. We would think something is wrong with a husband who is solely overjoyed at his wife’s fulfilling her career as an astronaut on a 6-year tour without him even if he tells her his love for her is purely selfless. Even though relationships of love often call for self-sacrificial behavior, there is something unattractive about love that is solely about maximizing the other person’s interests. But, again, that is what seeing parenthood as a conservatorship requires.

Does this all prove Dwyer’s view false? Not necessarily. But I think there is something to our (or at least, my) intuition that these outcomes are unacceptable. Maybe there is something about the parent-child relationship that is not a legal convention. Maybe biological parents who are just adequate have a right to raise their children even if others who are well-off could do a better job. Maybe.