Reading about a multiple-murder case from Texas and the ensuing discussion on Metafilter, I wax comparative and sociological. The story's banal except in the outcome: two teenage lovers are forbidden to see each other by the girl's parents, and the kids break the rule. The horror is in the breakage they performed: the boy and girl showed up one night with some buddies at the girl's house, killed the parents and the younger brothers and torched the house. Why on earth did that have to happen?

Siding with a minority of the Metafilter commentators, I think the crucial split occurs at this alternative: why didn't the young couple just elope and make a life for themselves? She was sixteen, so they'd have had to go to another state to marry without parental consent-- assuming they had to be married at all (forgive me for thinking that radical thought). But none of that is impossible to imagine or perform. The amazing thing is that the girl saw no way out of her predicament short of killing her parents; she couldn't imagine a life for herself that included a life for them. What can possibly account for that failure of imagination?

I say: parental control, internalized and accepted. The NYT, reflective of its reader base of comfortably well-off and educated people who need to be told all the time what other people in their class are doing, has been publishing inspiring stories-- well-timed to coincide with the economic bust-- that say that it's all right, even beneficial, to leave your kids alone, not hire soccer coaches, piano teachers, algebra tutors, social outreach coordinators and dermatologists to manage their every waking moment. The return to autonomy-- but put in a forum and format that assures us that the parents are more dependent on the herd than even their children are. Well, I like the idea of greater autonomy. But I don't know if Americans-- at least, Americans above the poverty line-- are ever going to get with that program. For it seems that we buy all the intervention we can afford, high tech or low tech.

Is there a scale of child autonomy? Impressionistically, I would expect to find that in some societies the children are practically considered property of the parents, required to accept their every decision without contest, and in some societies a sixteen-year-old is expected to make her own decisions about what to do and whom to do it with, even where to live. I put aside as exceptional (speaking optimistically) societies where war or epidemics have left great numbers of kids to fend for themselves. Lots of autonomy there, but not how anyone would want it.

A metric for child autonomy, usable because publicly assessable and coordinated with a specific moment in the child's life course, would be the Romeo-and-Juliet scale. In the group under consideration, are marriages or other unions arranged by the parents (RJ 1), subject to parental consent (RJ 2), or entirely up to the future spouses (RJ 3)?

Arranged marriages are still exotic and, presumably, rare in the US, but the negative version of arranged marriages, that is, parental exclusion of a potential mate, seems from my Metafilter evidence to be utterly common. It's part of our ideology of courtship here-- we want to believe that unions are freely entered into-- that only when the parents specify the future mate it's considered an arranged marriage. I'd like to think about the exclusion of unacceptable mates or dates by the parents as a somewhat more diffuse example of the same thing-- not equivalent, of course, but diluted in a quantifiable way. And-- still speaking impressionistically here, with a wish for statistics but no actual stats-- I bet that would put most American social groups somewhere in the middle of our Romeo-and-Juliet scale, in the RJ 2 zone but with pulls toward 1 and 3 depending on class, milieu, education, religion and so on.

In those terms, the family in the Texas case was definitely close to RJ 1, since the parents had extremely clear ideas about what would constitute an eligible match for the daughter and no one questioned their authority to make that determination (sneaking merely avoids conflict with authority, it doesn't subvert it effectively). How “normal” were they? The churchiness quotient was high, the option to home-school betokens uncompromisingness (though the parents had subsequently allowed their kids to return to public school and take jobs). So in some ways they were not in the middle of the comparison set and not much like most of the parents I know in my middle-sized college town. But parents having, not just strong opinions, but a conceded right to say yes or no: this probably is the kind of thing that people, if you asked them, would find unworthy of admiration in others but permissible in their own case. It's considered a case of caring, and caring is considered 100% good, though if I began “caring” about everything you do you would probably call it meddling. And that's where the problem of American parenting shows up, in the assumption that more parental leadership is always good, which correlates with a lack of concern for the initiative that kids might develop on their own. I don't know what other ingredients went into the Texas case, but the fact that the kids believed that nothing short of murder could solve their Juliet problem shows me that they had accepted to live their lives under the protection of two people with the authority of gods. In that strait-laced Texas Baptist household, the fifth commandment (“Honor thy father and mother”) should not have been promoted to the level of the first (“thou shalt have no other gods before me”).