This moral standoff is the logical end-point of a tug-of-war as old as liberalism: the question of who is responsible for shaping children — and to what ends....
Christian teaching, though, still held that children should submit to their parents. It was the liberalising thinkers at the wellspring of modernity who began winkling out people from under the authority of the church — and children from under the authority of their parents.
John Locke, one of the original liberal thinkers, argued for the separation of church and state, and it’s no coincidence that he was also the first parenting pundit. His Some Thoughts Concerning Education was published in 1693, and heavily influenced the next smash-hit parenting guide: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, written in 1763.
...Locke and Rousseau envisaged humans as autonomous, rational and capable of making decisions....
...What’s perhaps less obvious, though, is that a culture of individual freedom also means defanging parental authority in general. This was tacitly acknowledged by Locke, Rousseau and the innumerable parenting pundits who have emerged by dint of writing books on how to raise ideal citizens. Each parenting manual says, tacitly, that just being the child’s parents doesn’t make you right by definition....
...Yet in the centuries since Locke and Rousseau, the scope of those freedoms we consider our birthright has expanded too. This is usually treated as moral progress, but has also happened in no small part thanks to technologies that extend our strength, buttress our weaknesses or give us control where none existed before....
By severing sex from its material consequences, reproductive technologies took the danger out of desire, allowing us to reimagine sex as a kind of consequence-free leisure activity....
...Leaving aside the merits of this change, making the best of an emancipated world requires us — as Locke and Rousseau realised — to equip citizens to navigate it. It therefore follows that sex education isn’t just an option but a necessity: if you accept the premise that emancipation is good, then sexual emancipation and the free, consenting expression of desire is also good. And given that children need direct moral instruction prior to attaining full liberal citizenship, good liberal parents have an active duty to provide instruction to their children, from the earliest possible age, in the full range of acceptable modern sexual expression.
From this perspective, filling the heads of five-year-olds with information about polyamory, or masturbation, or non-binary identities, isn’t a precursor to sexual abuse at all — even if it’s done against the wishes of that five-year-old’s parents. Rather, it’s a vital part of preventing such abuse.
...We can argue about which desires should be repressed, and the nature of the oppression in extremis. But what we can’t do is offer sex education to children on the premise that education and consent can replace this need for limits. For when it comes to children, there is such a thing as too much information. And when it comes to sex, there really is such a thing as too much freedom.