News

Jew Yale Professor: Children Are ‘Hostages of Their Parents’

August 10, 2026

A Yale professor argued that America should consider giving younger voters greater political power, including potentially allowing young adults to cast proxy votes on behalf of children, while claiming parents may not be best positioned to represent their own kids’ interests.

Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn floated the proposal during an appearance on the New York Times podcast “Interesting Times,” hosted by Ross Douthat.

Moyn was discussing his book “Gerontocracy in America,” which argues that older Americans have accumulated disproportionate control over wealth, housing, employment, and political power at the expense of younger generations.

“I’ve gotten in some hot water for proposing we consider overweighting the votes of younger people or assigning the youngest eligible voters proxy votes for the unrepresented children of our country,” Moyn said.

Douthat immediately asked the obvious question.

“Why not assign them to those children’s parents?”

Moyn rejected the idea.

“Because there’s a divergence of interests between parents and children,” he said.

“I think it’s likelier that young people—not people who are raising families—will have the best insight into the interests of children.”

Yale Professor Says Children Shouldn’t Be ‘Hostages’ Of Parents

Moyn went further, arguing that parents frequently mistake the interests of the family for those of their children.

“I think parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interests of their children,” Moyn said.

“I think part of our goal as parents, but also as a society, is trying to make sure that children aren’t the hostages of their parents, as much as we rely on parents to raise them.”

Douthat rejected the argument outright.

“I think that’s daft,” he said.

“I think it’s absurd to imagine that a 24-year-old recent college graduate has a better assessment of the interests of my own children than I do.

“And I say this with all due respect to 24-year-old recent college graduates, of whom I hope to be the parent of in nine years or so.”

Douthat later joked that his experience suggested that “parents are more likely to be the hostages of their children.”

WATCH:

Critics Say Proposal Treats Families as Political Power Struggles

The exchange quickly drew criticism online.

Mount St. Mary’s University philosophy professor Josh Hochschild described Moyn’s framing as “liberalism at its purest.”

“All relations, even familial ones, are reducible to power struggles, inherently agonistic,” Hochschild wrote.

“Justice isn’t seeking a common good in trust with friends, it is balancing the inherently competing interests of enemies.”

Radio host Hugh Hewitt similarly argued that Moyn’s proposal clashes with the longstanding legal and cultural principle that parents hold primary responsibility for raising their children.

“The history of humanity—and the United States Constitution—is that parents are in charge of their children’s upbringings,” Hewitt wrote.

“Period. End of story.”

Hewitt noted that the Constitution could theoretically be amended to grant parents additional votes based on the number of children they have.

But assigning those votes to unrelated young adults, he argued, would represent something radically different.

“To assign those theoretical votes to other than parents or legal guardians is, to put it gently, wildly inconsistent with thousands of years of history and theology,” Hewitt wrote.

Critics Compare Idea to Totalitarian Attacks on Family

Other commentators framed Moyn’s proposal as part of a much older ideological hostility toward the traditional family.

An X account known as Cynical Publius argued that totalitarian political systems have historically attempted to weaken parental authority and replace it with state control.

“One of the tenets of most forms of totalitarianism, including Marxism and Naziism, is to destroy the family as the basic building block of society and replace it with the State,” the account wrote.

“Moyn is suggesting that parents should not have the right to speak for their children, and that third parties—presumably those chosen by a government led by evildoing ‘experts’ like Moyn—should speak on behalf of those children instead.

“This is not a new idea.

“Hitler embraced this idea.

“Stalin embraced this idea.

“Mao embraced this idea.”

Engineer Steven P. Smith made a similar argument.

“The Left has always viewed the family as the greatest threat to their lust for power,” Smith wrote.

“This is yet another in an endless list of attempts to undermine it.”

Other responses were even more cutting.

JD Flynn, editor of The Pillar, responded simply: “Check this guy’s hard drive.”

“That creep shouldn’t be anywhere near kids,” another user warned.

“You know who wants to keep parents and children separate? Predators.”

Proposal Comes Amid Debate Over America’s Aging Political Class

Moyn’s broader argument focuses on what he sees as excessive political and economic influence held by older Americans.

He has argued that younger generations face disadvantages in housing, employment, wealth accumulation, and political representation.

But his proposed “solution” of giving younger adults additional voting power, and potentially allowing them to politically represent children instead of parents, pushes the debate far beyond conventional generational reform.

Moyn serves as Yale University’s Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History, specializing in modern European intellectual history and Jewish studies.

Douthat, meanwhile, is preparing to leave his columnist role at the New York Times to join CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

He previously served as a senior editor at The Atlantic and is also a film critic for National Review.

Whatever the merits of reforming a political system increasingly dominated by older Americans, Douthat drew a clear line at one proposed solution.

The idea that unrelated young adults understand children better than their own parents, he said, is simply “absurd.”