You and I already have several existing threads debating the children’s rights issues.
Children’s rights are more fundamental than many other social norms because they are actually hardwired into the brain - they are not merely encoded in the culture, they are actually wired into our physiology. Despite the fact that it contradicts the absurd homo economicus model of the human being, parents do in fact give up their own lives for the sake of their children. In fact, the precondition for any child’s existence (pregnancy and childbirth) takes a heavy toll on the mother’s body, as a rule. Yet that price was willingly paid billions of times over because our mothers wanted to pay that price in order to have us.
To extend this issue even further, I believe that human biology and its maladaptedness to the modern environment since the Agricultural Revolution is the root cause of most of the ineradicable double-standards in human law. For example, men and women are treated differently under the law. The PC police pretend this is not the case but it is the case, in practice. The rights and duties of a male and female in a romantic relationship are not treated symmetrically by the law. In particular, the rights and duties of a man and woman are asymmetrical with respect to the parenting of the children - the mother is almost always treated with precedence over the father. There are good biological reasons why things should be this way, despite the fact that it’s clearly unfair if you reason about the father and mother as unisex human entities.
It is my view that private law (market competition in the production of dispute-resolution services) provides a path to the minimization of double-standards in law. By contrast, statutory law results in the aggrandization and expansion of double-standards (privileges) to the maximum extent - the only limiting factor being the collapse of society under the burden of these privileges. But, you say, there will be double-standards under private law, too! So what? This is like noting that there will still be crime under private law. So what?
Clayton -