Parental rights — who should be in control, parents or the state?

A new poll shows there is still strong support across party lines for parents to teach young children about sex and gender identity, and that schools should make parents aware if a child is questioning their gender identity. But a partisan split shows up when voters are asked whether they think schools are spending too much time on teaching about race and gender ideology versus the core subjects of math and reading.
A hot topic in the previous election cycle, there’s been little attention paid to education and parental rights in the 2024 presidential race. But in the waning weeks of the campaign, former President Donald Trump has raised transgender issues, along with parental rights and gender ideology in a bid to win over independent voters.
One of Trump’s chief surrogates, tech billionaire Elon Musk, has a child who underwent gender treatments, something he said he was “tricked” into allowing to happen. Musk’s child has since cut ties with him.
Musk moved his companies out of California after state legislators passed a law that says school districts cannot require teachers or staff to give parents information about their child’s gender identity.
On the other hand, Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris told teachers at an American Federation of Teachers convention in July that while they try to “teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history.”
Harris said “extremists” also wanted to “ban books” and “attack the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride.” She added that she was one of the first officials in California to perform same sex weddings, and said it “pains” her to think “20 years later that there are some young teachers in their 20s who are afraid to put up a photograph of themselves and their partner for fear they could lose their job.”
A HarrisX poll conducted for Deseret News shows there is broad consensus among Americans that parents should be responsible to teach young children about sex and gender.
“What we’re seeing is a growing demand for more parental rights and involvement, particularly when it comes to how their children are addressed in schools and whether medical interventions related to gender should be permitted for minors,” said Dritan Nesho, chief researcher and CEO at HarrisX. “This poll shows a clear and strong consensus across party lines that parents should be at the forefront of decisions about what their young children are taught regarding sex education and gender identity, and that schools should prioritize core academic subjects, while leaving sensitive issues like sex ed and gender declaration to families.”
When asked whether schools should provide sex education to children under age 10, 75% of respondents said that should be left to parents, while 25% said schools should provide that education. Strong majorities agreed with that assessment across political parties, genders, races, and generations.
Also, 72% agreed schools should not teach young children that gender is something they can declare, with 28% saying schools should teach children under 10 they can choose their gender. A majority of Republicans, at 90%, were in agreement, as were a majority of Democrats, at 58%. Among independents, 81% said schools should not teach children they can choose their gender.
There was also broad agreement on the use of pronouns, with 71% of Americans saying it should not be illegal to call someone by the wrong pronouns.
On the use of pronouns in the classroom, 65% of Americans said teachers should call children by the name and pronouns parents prefer, rather than the name and pronouns students suggest and prefer, with strong majorities of Republicans and independents in agreement. But a slight majority of Democrats (52%) said teachers should call students by the names and pronouns they prefer.
The partisan split was more pronounced when voters were asked whether they thought schools were teaching too much about gender identity and race ideologies, versus reading, writing and math. A majority of Republicans (63%) said schools were too involved with teaching kids gender and race ideologies, while 73% of Democrats and 58% of independents said schools focus on teaching kids reading, writing and arithmetic.
Evangelical protestants were more likely to say schools are too focused on gender and race ideology (64%) compared to non-evangelical protestants (43%), and Catholics (37%). Only 34% of atheists expressed this concern.
A strong majority of Americans say parents should know if their child wants to transition their gender, with 90% in agreement. There was only a slight variation on this question between members of different political parties.
There was also strong agreement on whether schools should be required to notify parents if their child requests to change their gender identification, pronouns, or preferred name at school, with 94% of Republicans saying parents should be notified, 80% of Democrats, and 87% of independents.
On whether children under 18 should be able to receive transgender treatments, including drugs or surgery, 75% of Republicans said they should never be able to access these treatments, compared to 40% of Democrats and 55% of independent voters. Another 44% of Democrats said minors should be able to access transgender treatments with parental consent, while 16% of Democrats said they should be able to access transgender on their own without parental consent.
Majorities of evangelical protestants (78%), non-evangelical protestants (53%), Catholics (55%) and other Christians (61%) said minors should never have access to surgical or non-surgical transgender treatments.
When asked generally if lawmakers should strengthen parental rights, 61% of Americans said they would support this, with 13% opposing, and 25% saying they don’t know.
Full poll results are available here.
Constitutional law expert Derek Black, professor of law at the University of South Carolina and director of the law school’s Constitutional Law Center, thinks parental rights issues are likely not how people will decide how to vote this election. “I’m not sure that parents were concerned about their rights that much until someone told them to be concerned about it,” he told Deseret News. “And then a lot of parents sort of reverted back to a sort of normal stasis on that.”
“It was, at least based on the reporting that I saw, that the Republican National Committee had said, ‘Hey, this is a way to drive voter turnout,” he added.
Tina Descovich, co-founder of parents rights group Moms for Liberty, agreed that parental rights issues aren’t top of mind for voters in 2024, adding instead voters are focused on fiscal issues.
“People are mostly concerned right now, it seems, with their budget and with finances and the prices at the grocery stores, and rightly so,” she said. “It’s an immediate concern that’s having an impact on their wallet and their ability to fund their family. And so I think that has moved up to center stage in some of the national conversations.”
But, Descovich said, that doesn’t mean parents aren’t still concerned about parental rights issues. She said her organization is still growing, adding 10 chapters in the past month and a half, and they receive calls from parents daily who want to understand their rights better when it comes to public education.
Descovich is supporting Trump in the 2024 presidential race. He has signed the Moms for Liberty parent pledge, which says, “I pledge to honor the fundamental rights of parents, including, but not limited to the right to direct the education, medical care, and moral upbringing of their children. I pledge to advance policies that strengthen parental involvement and decision-making, increase transparency, defend against government overreach and secure parental rights at all levels of government.”
On Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Descovich said she has concerns about their positions on parental rights and over allowing biological boys to play in girls sports.
She raised the issue of changes to Title IX under the Biden-Harris administration, which included adding gender discrimination to the definition of sex discrimination — something her organization sued over. Now, according to a federal judge’s ruling, if a child’s parent is a member of Moms for Liberty, the child’s school is exempt from having to implement the new Title IX rules.
Descovich said she wasn’t surprised to see strong agreement on several of the poll questions.
“Parents want to raise their kids. They want to raise them with their morals and their values and make decisions about their medical care and their education. They don’t want secrets kept from them. This is not a partisan issue,” she said.
She said teachers were “compassionate,” and said most of the teachers she interacts with got into their profession because they want to teach and help children. Most don’t want to engage on the social issues raising parents’ concerns, she said.
Descovich also didn’t see incompatibility between the issue of parents rights and saying parents couldn’t give permission for a child to use transgender treatments, because she sees the issue as one involving the safety of the child. “Parental rights stop when abuse starts,” she said. “Denying a child the opportunity to go through puberty and grow into the man or the woman that they are meant to be is child abuse.”
“Once these children are adults, they can go out and make decisions for themselves,” she said, adding she has met young people who transitioned as minors and now regret their decision.
Black said it’s important to define what’s meant by parental rights. Is it about a child having a gender operation? Book banning? Pronouns? They’re very different issues.
When folks are asked about Congress in polls, the lawmakers are often given “awful” marks, Black said. But ask someone about their congressman and responses tend to be much more positive. He thinks the same might be true when asked about how schools handle parental rights. It could be a case of lots of schools elsewhere are bad at it, but mine does pretty well, he said.
Black said he’s not aware of widespread teaching of gender fluidity in schools, but noted some schools may be more accepting than others of a child’s request. A little boy says he wants to be like his mommy or a little girl like her daddy or wants to be called a different name and schools may say fine, as long as your folks don’t care. Children go through stages. “Is that teaching gender fluidity or is that just allowing children to express themselves?” he asked.
Parents and their views matter to Black. But that is also where things get divisive, he said.
Questions of a child’s expression or a child’s gender are “hard for any of us to be certain what the right answer is or the right age. I’m being very careful here, but I think that everyone is going to get it wrong a certain percentage of the time,” he said, noting parents, schools, even courts may sometimes err. “At least for me personally I would say, if there’s going to be an error, I’m going to defer to the parents in making the error.”
“I think there are serious differences of opinion on this and I tend to say, since none of us has a corner on the truth or on the wisdom in all situation, you’ve got to defer to the parents. I think parents have got to be part of that conversation, whether educators like that or not.”
Asked about schools and sex education for young children, Black said kids under age 10 shouldn’t be having sex, so how you use the term sex education matters. “If you’re engaging in some sort of sex education, it’s probably more what I would call personal development and personal protection. I don’t think of that as being sex education. Schools can teach things related to sex but that aren’t sex education.”
He said asking if schools should teach sex education to children under 10 “is offering an assumption they’re doing something that I don’t believe that they’re doing.” He adds, “So instead of this is a maturation class for girls when they’re 10 years old or whatever, people are thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, are they telling him about contraceptives and stuff?’”
Black said there’s no uniform national standard on pronoun disagreements from the courts. What is clear is that decisions on student pronouns can’t be administered in a sexually harassing way, which violates Title IX.
He sees a disconnect when states say the parent has to be included, but then also try to box them out on having a say on medical care. Ideally, he said, medical treatment is a family decision, because how does the state know what’s best for someone. That’s his starting point.
Still, he added, “Having said that, medical treatment is far more serious than pronouns and so, on this one, I would say that there has to be some sort of mechanism by which a parent can be overridden. That’s not talking out of both sides of my mouth. It’s to say that the law has always recognized extreme situations. Parents get to determine what kids eat and how they discipline their kids. But at some point if things are serious enough, the state steps in. It doesn’t step in all the time, but sometimes it has to.”
He’d hate to see parents automatically overridden, he said, but believes there’s value in creating a way for a child, for instance, to petition the court, to say that “I’m old enough, I’m mature enough,” then a neutral third party could decide in some cases. There might be times when the court should decide.
Black tells the story, well-publicized, of a transgender male student in Virginia that highlights how young people can lose privacy for the sake of public discussion. The student sought to use a unisex restroom. His parents, his teachers and as far as anyone knew, the other students had no problem with it. Then an adult who was not an educator brought it to the school board. The young man’s name and personal details became very publicly known, despite his wishes for privacy. What bathroom he’d use became fodder for school board and public debates.
When he talks about the case with his law students, Black said he points out that the student probably never wanted his gender identity to be anyone else’s business, much less an entire community’s. But it happened.
“Particularly if you’re a person of faith and care about the stones that you cast and judging others, spewing out what, at least to children, seems like venom” seems uncalled-for, he said. “Can adults — and behind closed doors — have conversations? Do moms and dads and principals have some? Yes they do. But this open airing in which we vilify individual children or groups of children, I just don’t understand how that’s healthy,” he said.