Fairness In Parenting

Fairness is a minimum requirement of sound parenting, and many parents would at least profess to want to treat their children fairly.  The irony is that some of them might then turn around and impose restrictions on multiple siblings for the sake of one of them.  There is nothing fair about treating all children as if they have the same intelligence, consistency, desires, and motivations, and there is also nothing fair about refusing to differentiate between children of different philosophical and personal maturity, which means the only fair way to parent children is to treat them as the individuals they are regardless of how their parents perceive them.

It is actually unfair to impose unilateral restrictions on children who have different philosophical, emotional, and behavioral levels of maturity.  It is not sinful to let a young child watch an R-rated movie full of violence--and I do not mean the immensely exaggerated "violence" that some people think onscreen shootings automatically amount to--but it is legalistic and therefore sinful according to Deuteronomy 4:2 to impose unnecessary rules on a person of any age in the name of stopping an imaginary sin.  If a child can handle such a thing without misunderstanding the nature of what they see and without it negatively impacting their own personal psychology, there is nothing to object to!

Suppose that a child who is nine has a desire to behave violently towards their siblings after watching a particular film that is rated R for its violent content.  They go so far as to act on these desires and physically bully their own brothers or sisters.  The film has not made them do anything, but they choose to react in a certain way.  Their parents allow the siblings even younger than the troublesome child to watch R-rated movies that are even more violent, but they do not allow the latter child to watch even the violent, R-rated movie they have already seen.  In this situation, because the parents did not invoke slippery slope fallacies or do anything more than treat one child in accordance with his or her own deeds, they have treated all of their children fairly.

Christian parents usually pay lip service to fair discipline of their children without actually supporting anything close to the action of the parents in this hypothetical situation.  On the contrary, the very thought of allowing a child to watch an R-rated movie at the age of nine is horrifying to many of them.  At the same time that they impose legalistic constructs and prohibit all of their children from doing an activity that may or may not have negatively impact only a single kid, they might truly think they are determined to treat their children fairly--but their inconsistent actions betray their true irrationality.

Keeping one son or daughter from doing something that is not inherently problematic is not logically justified out of concern for how siblings might or might not subjectively react.  Fairness requires consistency, and treating people in accordance with their actions requires fairness on the part of parents.  Perhaps all parents would claim they hope to be fair, but few Christian parents operate on a truly individualistic basis, which is the only path to fairness that offers more than an illusion or misdirection.  There are far more crucial manifestations of fairness on the Christian worldview that those in parenting, but a consistent Christian parent would never treat one child a certain way for the sake of another child's actions.