🟡 Start Here: Children as Property?

What if children are not just mistreated, but misdefined? This lead article challenges a deeply embedded assumption in modern society—that children are, in effect, a form of property. Controlled, owned, and shaped at the will of adults, children are rarely viewed as sovereign individuals. What would it mean to reimagine the parent-child relationship not as ownership, but as stewardship or partnership? What does it cost us—and them—to maintain control disguised as care? This piece introduces the core questions explored in the Children as Property? series and offers several paths for deeper reading, reflection, and personal reckoning. You are invited to begin here.

Kevin Maillard on Children as Property

This summary introduces the key points of Kevin Maillard’s legal critique of how children are treated as property within U.S. family law. Drawing from constitutional principles and historical precedent, Maillard shows that children are often viewed through a framework of control and ownership rather than autonomy and rights. His work is essential for understanding how legal systems encode unconscious attitudes about power, dependency, and the myth of parental infallibility. This piece lays the groundwork for ethical and legal alternatives to adult-centered child governance.

The Tragedy of Belief

The Tragedy of Belief examines how well-intentioned convictions—religious, cultural, or ideological—can quietly become tools of domination, especially when applied to children. This article challenges the assumptions we rarely question: that belief justifies control, that adults always know best, and that obedience equals goodness. When belief is used to shape a child’s world without their voice or consent, it risks becoming a cage instead of a compass.

This piece explores how to unearth and unwind inherited narratives that distort love into authority—and how to reimagine belief as a force for freedom rather than fear.

Are Children Merely Property?

This provocative commentary poses a question few dare to confront: are children treated as people, or as possessions? Society rarely says it aloud, yet the language of ownership—“my child”—runs deep. Drawing on ethical and psychological insights, this piece invites readers to rethink parental control, institutional authority, and the unspoken assumption that children are shaped rather than sovereign. It argues that until we face this buried logic, efforts at educational or cultural reform will remain superficial. This is not a legal essay. It is a flare—meant to disturb, to illuminate, and to demand a more honest reckoning with our assumptions.

Beyond Ownership: What Does It Mean to Raise, Not Possess, a Child?

What if parenting wasn’t about control, but stewardship? This lead essay challenges the deeply ingrained belief that children are property—something to own, shape, or direct. Instead, it invites a radical reimagining of parenthood as a form of custodial care, where autonomy and presence matter more than obedience and control.

Drawing on ethical, psychological, and spiritual insights, the piece reframes the adult–child relationship in terms of trust rather than domination. It serves as a cornerstone for dismantling the possessive paradigm that undergirds so many parenting and educational practices.

Why Adults Struggle to See Children as Sovereign Beings

Why is it so difficult for adults to grant children full personhood? This article examines the cultural and psychological forces that condition adults to view children as objects of instruction rather than subjects of their own lives.

By unpacking the adult ego’s need for authority, the essay explores how deeply embedded fears—of chaos, loss of control, and unmet emotional needs—shape the impulse to dominate rather than relate. It proposes a shift from adultism to mutuality, where children are met with curiosity instead of command.

The Invention of Childhood as Control

What if our concept of “childhood” is not a biological given, but a cultural construct designed to justify control? In this piece, we examine how modern societies have defined children less by age or capacity and more by their assigned role within hierarchies. Childhood, in this view, becomes not a phase of growth, but a status of subordination.

By unpacking the political and social functions of childhood, we challenge the assumed innocence, dependency, and ownership embedded in the adult-child dynamic. What would it mean to treat children not as "becomings," but as beings—already worthy of rights, respect, and voice? This article opens the door to a radical reevaluation of what childhood has been made to mean.

Who Owns the Baby?: Trump’s Freedom Accounts and the Price of Belonging

When a government offers money to every newborn child, it’s framed as generosity—an investment in the future. But what if it’s something else entirely? What if it’s the soft branding of a soul, the quiet initiation of a child into a system that sees them first and foremost as property?

Trump’s proposal to grant $1,000 “Freedom Accounts” to American babies may sound like support. But in reality, it reawakens an ancient and unsettling question: Who owns the child? This piece explores the deeper cost of early institutional belonging—and what true sovereignty might demand instead.