Is “mental health” the new cudgel by which the state subverts parental rights? Developments on both sides of the Atlantic suggest the answer may be yes. Earlier this summer, Illinois became the first state to mandate annual mental health screenings for all public school children in grades 3 through 12. Parents may nominally opt out, but implementation rules remain vague. Meanwhile, one of former Polish president Andrzej Duda’s last acts in office was to refer to the Constitutional Tribunal a bill allowing children as young as thirteen to obtain psychological services without parental consent. Under the bill, parents would eventually be informed if their child was receiving those services, but their prior approval would not be necessary.
Both measures have been justified as responses to rising concerns about youth depression and suicide—especially in the wake of prolonged Covid shutdowns. Advocates speak in the soothing cadences of care: removing “stigma,” providing “access,” meeting “exigent circumstances.” What they do not explain is why parental involvement must be pushed aside.
Good parents, and good teachers, can recognize when a child is in trouble. But that does not justify the state stepping into the role of super-parent, initiating treatment independently of mothers and fathers. The argument here resembles earlier school-based “pragmatic” interventions such as condom distribution. When objections arise, officials reply that some parents are negligent or abusive, or that adolescents’ “privacy” must be protected. The real effect is to normalize state displacement of parents.
This pattern has been clearest in the realm of sexuality. In Parental Rights in Peril, Stephen Krason points out that, for decades, minors have been able to receive treatment for venereal disease—including AIDS—without parental consent. Planned Parenthood v. Danforth established a framework for minors to bypass parental involvement in abortion decisions; in some states, even parental notification has disappeared. Evidence of deliberate evasion continues, even in states with parental consent laws: Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools system is currently accused of facilitating abortions for minors without parental knowledge. A case headed for the U.S. Supreme Court, Foote v. Ludlow School Committee, will test whether schools may conceal a child’s school-time “gender identity” from parents.
The common thread is the erosion of parental primacy in favor of a new model of the child as a “little adult,” an autonomous chooser whose “rights” stand over against those of the family. Parents, in this vision, are reduced to one more interest group alongside the state, NGOs, and medical providers, all competing to influence the child.
That shift rests on a dangerously elastic understanding of “health.” In Doe v. Bolton, “health” as a justification for abortion was stretched to cover virtually any reason. Today, the medical establishment’s relativism has already redefined chemical castration and surgical mutilation as “gender-affirming care.” Tomorrow, it may allow the state to override parents in the name of protecting children from “medical neglect.” The Soviet Union notoriously used psychiatry to suppress dissent. The line between “mental health” and political conformity can be thinner than liberal societies like to admit.
Neither Illinois nor Poland has explained why state-initiated screenings or counseling are inherently superior to parental involvement. What these laws do achieve is a quiet reordering of authority. No matter how much concern he expresses, JB Pritzker is not a “co-parent” with Illinois families. Nor is it self-evident that a thirteen-year-old should pursue psychological treatment in Poland apart from the family that must bear the consequences of such care.
For when harm occurs, responsibility does not fall on governors, legislators, or school counselors. A daughter injured by an abortionist or scarred by “gender-affirming” treatments will not turn to a judge for help; she will return home. Complications from undisclosed medical treatment must be borne by the parents left in the dark. The day-to-day fallout of “psychological help” always ends up in the household, not the statehouse.
That said, let’s not delude ourselves about two huge benefits these proposals afford to the state. First, it provides them with a wealth of data about internal family dynamics that more intrusive jurisdictions could potentially weaponize against parents (for example, non–“gender-affirming” parents in child protective services cases). Second, it creates an opportunity to significantly expand Individualized Education Programs under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or other federal programs, to secure more federal and state funds to “rehabilitate” kids.
Catholic social teaching offers a framework for understanding why this all matters. The family is the first society, willed by God and prior to the state. Parents are the primary educators of their children (Gravissimum Educationis), and the state’s role is supportive, not substitutive. The principle of subsidiarity warns precisely against larger institutions usurping the natural functions of smaller ones. To treat parents as obstacles to be circumvented is not only imprudent policy—it is a violation of the created order.
What we are witnessing is the therapeutic state dressing its ambitions in the white coat of medical concern. But therapy is not neutral. It carries an anthropology, an implicit vision of the human person. In this case, the vision is of the isolated, autonomous self, shorn of family ties and tutored directly by experts and bureaucrats. Against this stands the Christian vision of the child: a person-in-relation, entrusted by God to his parents, formed in love and discipline, and only secondarily a subject of state interest.
The spread of these measures across very different political and cultural settings—progressive Illinois and Catholic Poland—shows the power of this therapeutic ideology. It is a new front in the old contest between parental primacy and state paternalism. If the camel’s nose under the tent is “mental health,” the tent at risk is nothing less than the family itself.
