The Public Interest

Children’s rights and adult confusions

Gerald Grant

Fall 1982

EXTENSIVE new rights have been conferred on American children. Children in some states, for example, are now empowered to divorce their parents. Thirteen year-old girls may obtain birth control devices over the objections of their parents. A Ukrainian mother, whose twelve-year-old son was separated from her and her husband because he did not want to move back to the Ukraine with them, put the current state of affairs this way: “Who really tells the children what to do? Are the children the parents and the parents the children?”

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