Introduction

Parents are best placed to protect and promote their children's rights and the vast majority of them do so very happily. Nevertheless, the privacy of family life ensures that parents can also tyrannise and abuse their children. Indeed, the physical dependence of young children makes an imbalance in power between them and their parents inevitable. It is clear that the law could do more to ensure that parents paid greater attention to their children's rights, if it took a more interventionist role. But social policy, strongly influenced by common assumptions about family privacy and parental autonomy, reflects a distinct lack of sympathy for the view that the law should attempt to interfere with family life.

This chapter starts by assessing the extent to which the assumption that the family should be free from legal regulation underlies current legislation governing the relationship between children and their parents. It then considers two areas which, despite being very different in content, demonstrate well the law's reluctance to intervene in order to promote children's rights. It assesses first the legal principles governing parents' right to control and discipline their children as they think fit. Second, it considers the law's treatment of the child's right to financial support and to be brought up with a reasonable standard of living. Both areas of law reflect how the concept of ‘private ordering’ dominates policies in these fields.