Re: The great irony for parental control advocates

If a child runs away from its parents to go on hunting and gathering of its own... well, with less accumulated experience they are at a greater risk of dying of hunger than they would be with parents.

I am talking about within a modern, industrialized society, not a primitive hunter-gatherer society, but since you brought it up, I will go with this. Read on.

If a child moves into a "community of people who sympathized with their desire to leave the parents"... which one would it be? Another existing hunter-gatherer family? Well, what do they gain by supporting someone else´s child?

They may gain an extra hand in hunting and gathering, as strength in numbers is important in such primitive societies. But a hunter-gatherer society is not relevant to our present situation. The situation is very different with a society that has not gained a measure of control over nature and one that has.

Eventually, at least one gender does move out of their birth family and settle elsewhere. New hunter-gatherer bands can be established, sometimes routinely.

Indeed. That would be an option.

But parental ownership of children is very real in the absence of state. Certainly there are many children who wish they could already be a parent of a prosperous band but know they cannot, and have to put up with their parents.

In more primitive societies, children are generally not forced into dependence on their parents for nearly as long as they are in our post-industrial society, and are raised to become independent as quickly as possible, and to participate in the running of the tribal unit as soon as they are reasonably able to do so. So children often had more options in such societies than they do today, where their dependence is artifically extended many years beyond what it would naturally be, and where kids under a certain arbitrary age are denied any participation in the running of society. Children would have options in hunter-gatherer societies that they do not have in modern post-industrial society. So, let me rephrase the thesis of my post in this thread:

If the state did not exist in a post-industrial society, either now or in the future, parents would not have the power to force dependence upon their kids, nor could they prevent their child from moving to another family who may be more compassionate and more respectful to the kids in question, or who would have no problem with the child in question working to help support the household. If it was a classless and moneyless society, then kids would have even more options to achieve independence than they do today, so in the future type of classless and stateless society that socialists and anarchists envision, parental oppression of youths would be nearly impossible (this is why so many anarchists support the program of youth liberation). But even if we did still have a capitalist society, with no state to enforce today's notion of child labor laws, there would be nothing to stop the proliferation of industries designed for younger employees, nor for any employer not to hire younger employees, and parents who wanted their kids to stay in school rather than work would have a far more difficult time in forcing them to do as the parents wished without the power of a state backing them up. After all, school as we know it today is only compulsory because the state insists that it is.

The great majority of parents are completely down with the requirements of the state with its insistance that kids do not engage in sexual activity until they reach the artificial age of majority, or that kids go to school rather than work before reaching that age of majority. Thus, conflicts between parents and the state are relatively rare, and curiously most often manifest among parental power advocates when they are faced with the prospect of the state enforcing the civil rights of youth in a constitutional democracy as opposed to enforcing parental authority and power. It's usually only in the latter case that the parents and parental power advocates cry "foul" and accuse the state of totalitarian behavior. But as long as the state enforces parental power rather than youth rights, parents and parental power advocates do not consider the state totalitarian at all.