Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
Authority implies the ability, right or knowledge to make decisions on behalf of someone else. The law, our culture and society, and many of our organized religions, put great emphasis on the importance of parents having this authority and exercising it, not allowing their own children to undercut it. Parents who decline to exercise this authority may have their children taken away from them.
In the past, this same authority extended to other adults. Slavery gave some people authority over other people. Family law gave some men authority over other men, women and children. Systems of government and military organizations continue to do the same.
The authority of one person over another has been increasingly limited in our society for the last century or so (with occasional reversals). Even the authority of parent over child is constrained. It has not, however, been completely eliminated.
In the early 1970s, Diana Baumrind wrote an influential article about parental authority, dividing parenting style into three groups (authoritative, authoritarian and permissive) based on parental choices in two areas (nurturance and control). Since then, most parenting books that do not singlemindedly describe The One True Parenting Style operate within this framework, and generally argue in favor of authoritative parenting (high nurturance, moderate control). Baumrind's data do not particularly support her thesis.
Her terminology is also problematic. Nurturing, while a nice idea in some ways, strongly implies a maturational/developmental model, with all of those problems. Control assumes or advocates the impossible, and legitimizes efforts in pursuit of it.
No one has the knowledge to make decisions on behalf of someone else, although older people have probably always believed that their greater life experience does indeed give them that knowledge. However, no amount of life experience turns one person into another: I may know a lot about how the world works, but I am not you. I do not have your past or your future, your values, your feelings, your beliefs or your preferencees. And while I might get really good at guessing those things based on increasingly better understanding of you, I can only approach your knowledge of yourself, never surpass it. Even if I had an insight into why you do things the way you do, an insight you conceal from yourself, you are surely better able to understand why that concealment is important, and when it is safe to accept that knowledge again into yourself.
Without that knowledge, one cannot consistently make better decisions for another than they can make for themselves. Independent of that observation, one cannot truly make decisions for another. They can still accept or reject our decisions, resist or sabotage what we decide for them. We can make their life hell if they do not comply, but that is hardly the same as deciding for them; rather, they decide based on our punishments. Usually people who think they are making decisions for another are actually limiting that person's scope of action.
Even if we had the knowledge to make decisions for another, and were somehow able to implement that decision in a non-coercive fashion, anyone who believes in liberty and freedom, and the importance of democracy, and the value of autonomous, interdependent adults, would hesitate to claim the right to make decisions for another, even an infant. Claiming that right is to expose our own belief in hierarchical systems, and a fundamental disbelief in the worth of others.
Of course they do. I'd reach out and stop an adult friend who was about to step in front of a bus. I'm not deciding for them. I'm deciding what I will do, and that has an effect on them when I reach out and yank them back onto the sidewalk. I'm just not kidding myself into believing I therefore have the ability, right or knowledge to, therefore and thereafter, live the rest of their life for them as well. Or even for the next five, ten or twenty years.
And if, after I have dragged them back onto the sidewalk, and they see the bus go by, they still object to my saving their sorry ass, I'll apologize to them.
Control Assumes or Advocates the Impossible, and Legitimizes Efforts to Attain It
Parent and Child Imply That Relationshiop Gives Power
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created March 8, 2006 Updated March 9, 2006