The great irony for parental control advocates

For the small number of people in this community who supports the concept of parental ownership and control over younger people under a certain arbitrary age, such individuals face a huge irony.

They constantly proclaim that the state should totally stay out of the lives of families, and never have anything to say over how parents raise their kids. But the thing is, under our current society, the state enforces parental power. The state grants the parents say over their children in many things, and almost never does the state support--or care about--how the child feels. There are a few cases where the state and parents knock heads over who gets to decide something--such as whether or not youths should be allowed to have sex or what they can or cannot read--but far more often than not, the state works harmoniously with parents to enable the latter's control over their kids. The state more or less codifies kids as being treated by their parents as property. Could parental power exist in a system that didn't have a state?

The real rub is this: if the state ceased to exist, how would parents control their kids? If a youth is unhappy at home to the point that they want to run away, who currently forces these runaways to return to the home of their parents? The police, who are agents paid and empowered by the state. If the state no longer existed, who would force kids to return home if they chose to leave? I can see some of you saying that in the absence of the state the parents would simply grab shotguns and hunt the child down throughout the countryside, but what if the youth moved into a community of people who sympathized with their desire to leave the parents and had firepower of their own to match that of the irate parents? What then? How easy would it be for parents to retrieve their kids under such circumstances without the help of the state? Also, how could parents stop their kids from working if the youths in question chose to work without present day child labor laws enforced by the state? How could parents insure that their kids went to school every day if they wanted their kids to go to school when the youths in question didn't want to if the state agencies weren't enforcing this? After all, aren't truant officers also working for the state?

The fact of the matter is, parental control and ownership of kids almost certainly cannot exist without the state to enforce it. The state is much more often a friend of parents than it is an opponent. These two types of authoritarian forces more often than not work in a reciprocal fashion with each other, and are not "natural" opponents in most cases. During the relatively rare instances when the two knock heads, parents will decry the totalitarian nature of the state while strangely defending their own totalitarian behavior (their power, in contrast to that of the state, is a "natural" right, they will most often claim). But the fact remains that without the state, parental ownership and control over their progeny would be almost impossible once the children became fully cognizant.