Child's right to family education: regulative dimension of the issue

Introduction: the authors address theoretical and methodological issues of the parents’ right to bring up a minor child. Theoretical background for choosing this research topic is inadequate tailoring of the legal theory of family education to the study of traditional family values and positive parenting relations. Hence, the place of jurisprudence in the cross-disciplinary doctrine of family education is not sufficiently obvious. Focusing on the need to develop a separate scientific discipline concerning the private-law position of a minor child within the family law theory, the authors address the issue of exercising the parental right to raise a child in its regulative dimension. They pose questions about family education as a social phenomenon and its correlation with public education; about subjects and participants of family education; about the individual non-property right of parents to raise a minor. Purpose: based on the current family law, to analyze legally possible and legally necessary patterns of parents’ behavior and behavior of persons substituting parents in relation to family education of a minor. Methods: the methodological framework of the research is based on the general scientific (dialectical) method of cognition of family law relations. Specific scientific methods of cognition applied in jurisprudence were also used; these include legalistic and logical methods. The major method was the multidisciplinary approach expressed in the doctrine of family modernization in the changing world. Results: the seeming obviousness of everyday family education and insufficient educational representation of the family education theory in legal studies are the reasons for the situation when positive aspects of family education normally stay outside the dogmatic focus, while the attention is given to the protection-centered aspects associated with destructive and deviant phenomena in family education. To overcome this state of affairs, the authors suggest that family law theory should include section about the status of a minor in family law as its actual part. So far, this theory only exists speculatively, and therefore it is fragmented in nature. The initial phase of its formalization may be a change in the taxonomy of rules included in Chapters 11 and 12 of the Family Code of the Russian Federation. Proceeding from the theoretical and methodological premise prescribing what, how and why legal scholars should do to present the corresponding scientific domain, the authors investigated the procedure for exercising the personal non-property right to raise a child and the attendant priority of this right over other persons. The results of the study let the authors make conclusions about non-exhaustiveness of the list of personal non-property rights of parents aimed at raising a child (the ‘positive symbol’ rights), about the indivisibility, inalienability and strictly personal nature of the parents’ right to raise their children; about inadmissibility of the parental refusal to exercise the right to raise a minor, and impossibility to transfer parental rights to other persons. The authors see their scientific contribution in the creation of the theoretical groundwork necessary for the legislator to build a developed, internally consistent system of rules that would construct an adequate interaction between the subjects of family education.