Children are among the most vulnerable members in any society, and theirs is a vulnerability grounded in their dependency on others for care and protection from harm. A child’s dependency-based vulnerability establishes significant obligations for others—most notably parents—to protect her from harm and provide the care and resources needed for her to develop into a fully functioning member of the moral community. Beyond the child’s vulnerability to harm and neglect, however, there is also vulnerability in respect of autonomy development. Joel Feinberg influentially defends a child’s right to an open future as an anticipatory autonomy right, drawing attention to the fact that parents (and those who act in loco parentis) can treat a child now in ways that will restrict the development of the child’s autonomy in the future. Yet a requirement to protect a child’s right to an open future is in tension with the proclaimed interest of parents in being free to impart their own substantive values to their offspring. This chapter considers the question of whether parents who actively seek to inculcate values in their children are failing to respond adequately to their child’s vulnerability. While recent cases before the Australian Family Law Court have imposed restrictions on the extent to which parents may expose children to particular kinds of values, the alleged interest of a parent in being free to impart her own values has not received sufficient attention in the philosophical literature. This chapter considers whether an adequate recognition of children’s vulnerability would entail a requirement of parental values neutrality and, if so, whether such a requirement would be problematic.

Questions concerning a child’s vulnerability to the impact of her parents’ values recently attracted the interest of the Family Court of Australia. In his interim ruling in the case of Hoover & Hoover (2009), Deputy Chief Justice John Faulks imposed a significant curtailment on parental exposure of the child in this case to the extreme right-wing, neo-Nazi political views of her parents. 1 The Justice