If you want to discuss children’s property rights, you need to understand two basic things:

How you engage with your children regarding their property rights in the home will have a big impact on your relationship with them. As a parent you have learn to exercise your position of responsibility while still respecting your children as individuals.

Broadly speaking, property is something that someone has legitimate control over. Someone may be an individual or a group of two or more. Controlling means having legal rights to use, rent, or sell the property. I speak in terms of natural law more than governmental law, although illegitimate force is too often used to usurp true property rights. However, that is a subject for another time.

Almost everyone agrees we all own our own bodies. At least everyone thinks they own their own body, whether or not they want to argue about someone else’s bodily rights. No one else can use their brain to tell your mouth to speak or your legs to walk. They may coerce you, but they do not have ultimate control. It is a nicely built in feature that makes self-ownership as obvious as the nose on your face.

Everyone also has objects they call their own. From clothes to houses, it is obvious that everyone claims some things as their’s. One way or another, someone has priority, preference, decision making control over certain objects.

Everyone claims some sort of space as their’s, to one extent or another. Even in prison camps, there are many stories of guards not venturing in areas due to lice or potential violence. Certain areas are claimed by the prisoners.

Consider the common question, “Is this chair yours?” while in a restaurant? Even in a temporary and/or rented scenario, we acknowledge that being somewhere and using that space gives us a temporary right of ownership. If we bring our own chair, it gives us more ownership rights, even on someone else’s land. If we own the land, we are within our rights to ask someone to leave, but we never own their body or their things even if they are on our property.

There are some things on earth that it seems harder to establish ownership of, such as air or water. However, the fact that those with governmental power jealously guard those very things from citizens and other governmental powers suggests this is not so far fetched after all. If governmental groups can discuss such boundaries amongst themselves, then surely the rest of us are capable of working out these boundaries privately.

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