The U.S. Department of Education has announced it would investigate claims a Massachusetts school facilitated a child’s gender transition without notifying parents. The facts are in dispute, but the case raises an issue that has received increasing attention recently: the degree to which government officials can exclude parental influence in children’s lives.

This is actually not a new issue. In one of the earliest U.S. Supreme Court decisions to directly address the issue, in 1923, the justices discussed ancient Greek debates over the authority of parents. The Court’s decisions establish that parents must be allowed to choose a nonpublic school for their child. Parents must also be allowed to exercise their religious responsibility to direct their children’s upbringing in school attendance and curriculum. Parents’ decisions about children’s health care are entitled to respect by the state.

Two pending cases in the Supreme Court raise these issues directly.

In the first, a father alleges a state university hospital performed a surgical procedure on his child contrary to a court order requiring him to be notified. The father is asking the Court to make an initial ruling on whether the case can proceed. Sutherland Institute filed a brief encouraging the Court to decide this case.

The Court has already accepted a case challenging Washington state’s policy of selectively declining to notify parents when their child runs away and is in state custody. The general rule is that notification is required, but the state makes an exception when the child is considering gender transition. In that circumstance, the state assumes the parents can be excluded even without any finding of wrongdoing. Sutherland has filed a brief in this case as well.

The briefs argue that the states’ actions are inconsistent with the constitutional recognition of parents’ responsibility to direct their children’s upbringing. They interfere with the parent-child relationship of particularly vulnerable children in need of parental direction. They undermine the ability of those parents to fulfill their responsibility to protect their children’s well-being. They interfere with the very things parents need to protect their children: custody of the children, notice of critical information about them, and the opportunity to influence their decisions. And they do this without any finding of parental unfitness, but merely because the parents differ from the state’s preferred position on matters of gender and sexuality.

None of this is to suggest that parents have unlimited discretion in child-rearing. The state has a compelling interest in protecting children from abuse and neglect. That is one reason to hesitate before adopting the phraseology of “parents’ rights.”

The reality, though, is that parental influence is usually an essential protection to children’s well-being, so preserving that influence benefits children. When parents pose a threat to children’s safety, the state should act. But ideological disagreements are not a reason to cut parents out of a child’s life.