Meyer, Pierce, Yoder and Troxel Prove the Constitution Puts Parents First

Somewhere along the line, the idea that parents have a constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children got filed under "recent culture-war talking point." You can hear the tone in the voice of the cable panelist who says it: parents' rights, he says, with a little air-quote in his eyebrows, as if the phrase had been cooked up last Tuesday by a consultant with a mailing list.

Let me save you the trouble of arguing about it on the internet. The Supreme Court said it in 1923. It said it again in 1925, in 1972 and in 2000. The doctrine is older than the interstate highway system, older than television and older than the Department of Education by more than half a century. Whatever you think of the politics around it today, the legal claim is not new, and anyone who tells you it is has skipped the reading.

The thesis and the terms

Here is what I am arguing. The Constitution protects a presumption that fit parents, not the government, direct the upbringing and education of their children, and the state must justify any intrusion on that presumption.

Define the terms. "Parents' rights" here does not mean parents can do anything to a child. It does not mean the state has no role. It means a default rule: when the parent and the state disagree about how a child is raised, the burden of explanation falls on the state. That is a claim about who has to prove what, which is a different thing from a claim about who wins every time.

Notice also the two kinds of claims in this fight. One is a factual claim about the case law: what the Court actually held. The other is a value claim: whether that is how things ought to be. I will make both, and I will tell you which is which. The case law is the factual part, and it is verifiable. Whether parents should come first is the value part. I think the Court's answer was right. But let us start with the evidence.

Premise one: Meyer v. Nebraska, 1923

After the First World War, a wave of anti-German feeling swept the country, and Nebraska passed a law forbidding the teaching of any subject in a language other than English in any school, public or private, before the eighth grade. A teacher at a Lutheran parochial school named Robert Meyer was convicted for teaching a young child to read in German, using a Bible story as the reading material.

The Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice James McReynolds, struck the law down on June 4, 1923, by a vote of 7 to 2. The Fourteenth Amendment says no state may deprive any person of liberty without due process of law, and the Court held that liberty includes the right of parents to bring up their children and the right of a teacher to teach, within reasonable limits. The state, the Court said, had gone beyond the reach of its power. A legislature could not simply decide that its preferred curriculum was the only acceptable one.

The Court did not say the state had no interest in education. It said the state's interest did not authorize arbitrary interference. That is the first brick: parental liberty is a constitutional interest, and it counts for something when the legislature starts to dictate.

Premise two: Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925

Two years later came the case that most directly protects the family's role. Oregon, by a ballot initiative in 1922, had required nearly all children between the ages of eight and sixteen to attend public school. The effect would have been to shut down private and parochial schools in the state. The measure had backing from groups with ugly motives, a story told in The Klan-backed school law that gave American parents a constitutional right. A Catholic order of sisters that ran schools, and a private military academy, sued.

On June 1, 1925, the Supreme Court unanimously struck the Oregon law down. Justice McReynolds wrote again. The law, he said, interfered with the liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control, and he used a line that every parent ought to know: the child is not the mere creature of the State. The state may regulate. It may inspect, examine, and require that children be taught certain basic subjects and that teachers be competent. What it may not do is standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.

That is the second brick, and it is the larger one. It says the state cannot hold a monopoly on schooling. Read that again. Every school choice program, every private school, every homeschool in America operates in the space that Pierce cleared.

Premise three: Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972

Fast-forward nearly fifty years. Wisconsin required children to attend school until age sixteen. Members of the Old Order Amish, whose faith holds that formal education beyond the eighth grade exposes children to a worldly environment at odds with their way of life, kept their children out after that point and were convicted. Jonas Yoder was one of the parents.

On May 15, 1972, the Court ruled for the parents, in an opinion by Chief Justice Warren Burger. Two justices did not take part, and Justice William O. Douglas dissented in part. The Court said that the state's interest in compulsory education, though strong, did not override the First Amendment claim of the Amish, whose religious way of life had been sustained for centuries and who prepared their children for it through vocational training at home. It also described the traditional primary role of parents in the religious upbringing of their children as established beyond debate.

Be fair about its limits. The Court took pains to say that the decision rested on the unusual record of the Amish community, and courts since have not read Yoder as a blanket exemption for anyone with a sincere objection to school. But it is the third brick: where parental authority and religious liberty overlap, the state needs a very strong reason to override both. Decades later, in 2025, the Court relied on Yoder in Mahmoud v. Taylor, holding that parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, were entitled to opt their children out of lessons built around certain storybooks that conflicted with their religious beliefs. Whatever you think of that result, notice that it rests on the line of cases we are tracing.

Premise four: Troxel v. Granville, 2000

The most recent case of the group moved the principle from the schoolhouse to the living room. Washington State had a law that allowed any person to petition a court for visitation with a child at any time, and let the court grant it if it found that visitation was in the child's best interest. A grandparent couple used it to seek more visitation with their granddaughters than their fit mother was willing to allow. A trial judge granted more time than the mother wanted.

On June 5, 2000, the Supreme Court held the law unconstitutional as applied. The opinion of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, joined by three other justices, described the interest of parents in the care, custody and control of their children as perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests the Court has recognized. The problem with the Washington law was that it let a judge override a fit parent's decision simply because the judge thought a different arrangement would be better. A fit parent, the Court said, is presumed to act in the best interests of the child.

A caution is in order. Troxel was a plurality opinion, not a majority, and the justices who agreed on the result differed about the reasoning. Justice Thomas, concurring, said the right should be subject to the strictest scrutiny. Justices Stevens, Scalia and Kennedy dissented, each for different reasons. So the case is evidence that the presumption exists, but it does not settle every question about how strongly it applies. I tell you that because the other side will bring it up, and you should not be surprised.

The strongest objection: Prince v. Massachusetts, 1944

Now to the best counter-argument, which I want to state in the terms that its supporters would accept.

Between Meyer and Yoder sits a case that says parents' rights are not absolute. In Prince v. Massachusetts, decided in 1944, Sarah Prince, a Jehovah's Witness, was convicted under a child labor law for allowing a child in her care to sell religious literature on the street. She argued that the law violated her freedom of religion and her authority over the child. The Court, by a vote of 5 to 4, upheld the conviction, in an opinion by Justice Wiley Rutledge. Parental authority, he wrote, is not beyond limitation, and the state has wide power to act for the child's welfare even against a parent's claim.

The objection is that this proves the state, not the parent, has the last word whenever it asserts the child's welfare.

Here is the answer, point by point.

1. Nobody in this tradition says "absolute." The claim is a presumption, not a trump card. Prince is a perfect illustration of where the presumption yields: where the state is protecting a child from labor, neglect or physical harm, areas where the interest is concrete and the line is clear. I accept that line, and so does every serious defender of parents' rights.
2. Prince is about a specific harm, not a general power. The state in Prince invoked a child labor statute, the sort of law that has ancient roots, aimed at a defined danger. It did not claim a right to decide what the child should believe, read or learn.
3. The burden still matters. The reason the Court wrote a careful opinion in Prince, and not a one-line order, is that the state had to justify itself. The presumption in favor of parents is what forced the justification.
4. The cases fit together as a map. Meyer and Pierce say the state cannot dictate the content and channel of a child's education on its own preference. Yoder says that where faith is involved, it needs a compelling reason. Troxel says a judge's opinion that something would be better does not outweigh a fit parent's choice. Prince marks the boundary where genuine harm begins. Put together, they describe a zone in which parents decide, and a perimeter, at the edge of harm, where the state may enter.

That is not a loophole. It is the design.

The second objection: where in the Constitution?

Some conservatives are uneasy, and they have a fair point. These decisions rest on the "liberty" in the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, which the Court has read to include rights not listed in the text. That doctrine, called substantive due process, has been used for a great many things that conservatives dislike, and a textualist is entitled to ask where the parents' right comes from.

My answer is twofold. First, the right is not an invention of the twentieth century. Blackstone's Commentaries, the standard legal text of the founding generation, described the duties of parents to maintain, protect and educate their children. The common law recognized parental authority long before there was a Fourteenth Amendment. When the Amendment protected "liberty" in 1868, it protected a liberty that already had a settled meaning. Second, the history matters more than the label. If the doctrine is to be grounded elsewhere, in the Privileges or Immunities Clause or in the Ninth Amendment, that is a debate about the address. It is not a debate about whether the house exists. For the practical purposes of a parent standing before a school board, the case law is what governs, and you can cite it.

What it means in practice: three hypotheticals

Let me show how this works, using three invented situations.

• A state announces that every child must attend a state-run school, with no exceptions. This is Pierce. Unconstitutional.
• A state requires parents who teach their children at home to file a notice and have the child's progress reviewed once a year. This is within the zone of reasonable regulation that Pierce itself acknowledged. A court would likely allow it, and the details of the review are for the legislature.
• A court orders extra visits with a non-parent over a fit parent's objection, solely because a judge thinks it would be nicer for the child. This is Troxel. Unconstitutional as applied, absent more.

None of those requires you to be a lawyer. They require you to know four names and one date apiece. For the school board side of the story, see A Parent's Checklist for Finding Out What Your Child's School Teaches, and for the case that protects a child's right not to be forced to salute, read West Virginia v. Barnette and the Flag Case That Protects Every Parent. The big picture of who runs the schools is in The Constitution Never Mentions Schools and That Is the Whole Point.

The bottom line

• Parents' rights are not a recent talking point. The Supreme Court recognized them in Meyer (1923) and Pierce (1925), confirmed them in Yoder (1972) and applied them in Troxel (2000).
• The rule is a presumption, not an absolute. The state may step in to protect a child from real harm, as Prince (1944) shows, but it has to justify the intrusion, and "we know better" does not qualify.
• The state may regulate private and home education reasonably, and it may not hold a monopoly on schooling. That is Pierce, and it is why school choice exists at all.
• When a school, an agency or a judge says it knows your child's interest better than you do, ask what harm they are trying to prevent, and under what law. The burden is on them.
• Know the five case names. They are a better tool at a school board meeting than a raised voice.