"Parental Rights" Conservatives Smear Connecticut's Attempt to Prevent Child Abuse

The latest front in America’s culture wars has arrived with a familiar script: according to right wing media, the left is once again coming for your children. The culprit this time? Connecticut Democrats who want to know how many children in the state are homeschooled.

Connecticut, which currently does not specifically regulate homeschooling at all, passed a bill on May 4th to add some minimal oversight of home education. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board characterized this effort as “Connecticut Goes After Homeschoolers.” The Homeschool Legal Defense Association, a national, conservative homeschool lobbying group, called the bill “repugnant to American tradition.” A local organization said that the bill is a “heinous display of cowardice, immorality, and utter disdain and shredding of our federal and State Constitutions.” Senator Eric Berthel, ranking member on the Connecticut General Assembly’s Education Committee said, “What is at stake…is not simply homeschooling but the meaning of liberty itself.” Meanwhile, Fox News is running interviews with homeschooled kids whose parents have told them their way of life is under attack by the big, bad government, and why won’t they just let us learn?

So what does this horrifying bill actually do? Remarkably little, actually. In its current form, it requires parents to notify their local school districts whether their children will be educated at public school, private school, or at home. Also, before a child is withdrawn from school for home education, the state confirms that the adults in the house are not under active child welfare investigation or on the state’s abuse and neglect registry. That’s it. There are no curriculum mandates, no home inspections, and no academic reporting. It is a small measure to prevent abusive parents from pretending to homeschool in order to keep their kids from public view and to give legislators an idea of how many children receive home education. This is the “tyranny” currently animating a national outrage cycle.

The gap between the bill’s actual provisions and its portrayal on the right reflects a broader political strategy in which even minimal, widely supported safeguards are reframed as existential threats to parental authority. At the center of this effort is the language of “parental rights,” a phrase that polls well and sounds intuitively reasonable. Of course parents should have primary responsibility for raising their children and have wide latitude in how they educate them. But in contemporary political discourse, “parental rights” has come to mean something far more expansive.

In its most extreme form, the concept is deployed to argue that the state has virtually no legitimate role in ensuring that children are educated or protected from harm. Any attempt to establish baseline expectations about schooling, medical care, or even basic welfare can be cast as an illegitimate intrusion. The problems with this framework extend so far that the Texas Supreme Court is currently considering whether the state can legally intervene in cases of clear physical and emotional abuse under the state’s “parental rights” constitutional amendment.

However, the right’s framing is divorced from reality, both in practical terms and in historical context. Connecticut’s current efforts were inspired in part by tragic cases in which parents withdrew their children from school under the pretense of homeschooling and subsequently subjected them to severe neglect or abuse with tragic consequences. In these situations, the absence of even the most basic notification requirements means that no public institution knows the child is missing, let alone able to intervene. There are significant issues with the Connecticut Department of Children and Families that contributed to these tragedies as well, and the state has already passed a law this session to address those shortcomings. The DCF portion of the homeschooling bill simply closes another small gap. The bill does not presume wrongdoing by parents but simply ensures that the state is not entirely blind.

More broadly, the idea that any such measure represents a radical expansion of government power is historically illiterate. From the earliest days of American society, education has been treated as a public concern subject to legal oversight rather than a purely private matter.

In the 17th century, colonial governments imposed enforceable duties on parents to ensure that children learned to read and understood basic civic and religious principles. Officials were authorized to investigate households and penalize those who failed to meet these obligations. A few years later, laws required communities to establish schools, reflecting a shared understanding that literacy was essential to social stability and self-government. These binding legal requirements backed by enforcement mechanisms were in place long before the existence of modern public school systems or compulsory attendance laws.

By the time of the American founding, this tradition had evolved into the widely accepted principle that a functioning republic depends on an educated citizenry, and the government has a role in making that possible. Early American leaders were explicit on this point, arguing that without widespread knowledge, democratic institutions would be vulnerable to manipulation and decay.

And yes, these beliefs coexisted with strong respect for parental authority. Families retained broad discretion over how education was delivered, which has been affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court—within judicially-determined limits, like any constitutional protection. But that discretion was never understood to include the right to deny education altogether or to operate entirely beyond public accountability. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Supreme Court held that parents have a substantive due process right to direct the upbringing of their children and that the state cannot require children to be educated in public schools rather than private schools. The opinion’s dicta that “the child is not the mere creature of the state” has become a rallying cry for parental rights extremists, but they ignore the fact that home education was not addressed in the opinion and that it also said that “no question is raised concerning the power of the State…to require that all children of proper age attend some school, that teachers shall be of good moral character and patriotic disposition, that certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught, and that nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare.”

In that context, today’s “parental rights” absolutism is actually a departure from the country’s constitutional history and tradition. The notion that education was once a wholly private domain, free from government involvement, is a myth born from conflating the absence of modern bureaucratic systems with the absence of regulation itself.

What Connecticut lawmakers are proposing falls squarely within the historical mainstream. They are not attempting to control how parents teach their children or imposing ideological content or intrusive monitoring. They are simply trying to ensure that children are accounted for and safe, and that the state has a basic understanding of how many students are being educated outside traditional schools. Framed honestly, this is a pretty boring matter of administrative competence and child welfare.

But honesty is precisely what the current political ecosystem discourages. Casting routine policy questions as existential threats is more effective at mobilizing outrage than engaging with the details. And so a minimal notification requirement becomes a “crackdown,” a database check becomes “surveillance,” and a limited safety measure becomes an alleged plot to separate families.

Beyond being disingenuous, this framing also makes it harder to address real problems. When even the most modest proposals are treated as unacceptable, the space for pragmatic compromise disappears. Lawmakers are left navigating between doing nothing and triggering a backlash fueled by misinformation, and in the meantime, children of parents only pretending to homeschool are left behind and families actually homeschooling have no access to any kind of support from the state even if they want it.

The homeschooling debate does not have to be a zero-sum conflict between parents and the state. What is lost in the endless outrage cycle of parents versus government is the rights of children themselves and where responsibility lies for protecting them. It is entirely possible—and historically consistent—to support both robust parental freedom and reasonable public safeguards. That balance has defined American education policy for centuries. The question is whether the conversation will reflect that reality, or continue to be driven by a narrative in which any acknowledgment of public responsibility is treated as tyranny.

Featured image is Connecticut State Capitol, by Sage Ross