Exactly how large should the State loom in the lives of children? In Scotland the answer is, very large. A new piece of legislation has just been unveiled called the ‘Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill’ and under it, every child in Scotland will have an overseer appointed by the State to see to their ‘welfare’.

The main purpose of the Bill is to ensure that a child (and the child’s parents) has an advocate when accessing ‘service providers’.

It seems to go much further than this, however. If I’m reading the Bill correctly it seems to commit the Scottish Government to full implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

The CRC potentially gives the State enormous power over children. It confers on children rights traditionally associated with adults such as freedom of association, the right to privacy, freedom of thought, conscience and religion. These are choice rights.

When does a child acquire these rights according to the CRC? They acquire them according to their ‘evolving capacities’.

And who decides when a child’s capacities are sufficiently ‘evolved’? On this point the CRC is unclear. If it’s parents, then no problem. The child will gain these rights in any case at the age of 18.

But if it is the State, then we have a very big problem because it empowers the State to tell parents that their child is now old enough to watch what they like, read what they like, go to church or not go to church, join what they like. This effectively makes the State the co-parents of children. Indeed, it allows them to overrule parents making the State the parent altogether.

So the question is this, in Scotland exactly how much power will these overseers (called a ‘named person’) have?

But even if their role is simply to act on behalf of children (and if need be their parents also) when children are accessing ‘service providers’, this alone creates an unprecedented type of relationship between children and the State.

Basically, every child in Scotland is going to be told that they have a State official assigned to “promote, support or safeguard the[ir] wellbeing”.

This automatically introduces a very powerful individual into a child’s life who will act as the State’s representative in his or her life. We can imagine that once they go to school, children will be told about their ‘named person’, about the role of this ‘named person’ and about their supposed rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

They will then march back into their families armed with all this knowledge. What truly free society would consider intruding this State official into the lives of families?

Sometimes it seems as though the State wants to ‘help’ families so much it would ideally like to have a social worker living in every home in the land.