Texas Parental Rights Amendment Threatens to Invalidate Child Abuse Laws

The Texas Supreme Court is set to decide a major child abuse case that could affect when the state can legally protect children from violence by their parents.

The case, In re Interest of K.N., K.L., K.L., and K.L., began in 2022 as an effort by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to provide services — and later to terminate parental rights — following credible reports of child abuse and neglect against four children. But during oral arguments in this past December it was clear the stakes of the case had changed: Some justices seemed open to the possibility that a state constitutional amendment enshrining parental rights, which was passed by Texas voters in November 2025, could invalidate Texas’s child abuse laws and require leaving children in abusive homes. The amendment establishes a parent’s “fundamental right to exercise care, custody, and control of the parent’s child, including the right to make decisions concerning the child’s upbringing.”

This case is hardly the only one of its kind. In several jurisdictions across the country, spurred on by potent social movements, courts have shown interest in recognizing parental rights far more absolute than any recognized in constitutional precedent or the common law. These cases — and K.N. in particular — illuminate the dangers of such unlimited parental rights.

From an Ordinary Case to a Major Constitutional Dispute

K.N. began when the state protective services department intervened in a case involving four children who seem unquestionably to have been victims of abuse and neglect. For example, to discipline the oldest child, the parents in K.N. deprived her of food, forced her to sit against the wall for hours, beat her with a belt and a wooden spoon, dragged her by the hair, and forced her to kneel for extended periods on grains of rice. School officials and family members notified the state after noticing bruises, scratches, and belt marks on one of the children’s bodies.

The state first sought and received an order that the mother, who perpetrated most of the violence, participate in counseling, but she refused. Instead, the parents moved to Louisiana without informing the state and subsequently chose not to enroll their children in school in the hope of preventing a further abuse investigation. The Texas protective services department then moved to terminate the parents’ rights. The parents requested a trial, after which a jury found four grounds to terminate the mother’s parental rights to her oldest child (whose father is “unknown,” according to court filings) and the father’s rights to the other three children. The four children were placed in the custody of the state.

The parents appealed, arguing that the trial court lacked jurisdiction because they had moved to Louisiana and that there was insufficient evidence to justify the termination of their rights. The case seemed limited to those questions ahead of the oral arguments before the Texas Supreme Court last December.

For the first half hour of the oral arguments, the court focused on these issues. Then, Justice James Sullivan asked the state’s attorney about the recently enacted parental rights amendment. Before it was passed, a number of conservative advocacy groups promoted it as an uncontroversial way to enshrine and protect existing rights, even if the courts or state legislature were reshaped. But the justices seemed unsure about whether the amendment simply constitutionalized parents’ existing rights or recognized new ones.

Citing a brief filed by the Family Freedom Project, a group that “defend[s] the God given right of parents to raise their children,” Sullivan asked whether the new amendment required that the child abuse agency’s actions be evaluated under strict scrutiny, the most exacting standard of judicial review, which often results in an adverse outcome for the state. The parties had not discussed the amendment in their briefs and appeared unprepared for questions on it.

Alarmingly, several justices seemed open to the possibility that the parents’ conduct was protected when evaluated under the strict scrutiny standard. Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock asked whether reasonable juries might find that the “aggressive discipline” in this case was not abuse and whether there was “a constitutional right to administer [] reasonable discipline to [a] child.” Blacklock seemed especially concerned that parents would be punished for spanking. The justices also asked how to evaluate the parents’ conduct: whether the court should use standards from 1876, when the state constitution was ratified, or whether “2025 standards,” as Sullivan put it, were more appropriate. Blacklock expressed an openness to the possibility that “spanks with a belt” might be protected by a fundamental parental right, even if those beatings left bruises.

Two days following the argument, the court issued an order seeking supplemental briefing on the parental rights amendment’s effect on the proceedings. The case has since attracted interest from the powerful Texas Public Policy Foundation, one of the primary advocates for Texas’s amendment, which filed an amicus brief in the case urging the Texas Supreme Court to apply strict scrutiny in any case involving the termination of parental rights. The foundation argued that, because of the amendment, the state had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that parental rights should be terminated, rather than applying the somewhat less demanding current standard of “clear and convincing evidence.”

“Parental Rights Absolutism” Gains Speed

This type of broad assertion of parental rights, which we refer to elsewhere as “parental rights absolutism,” is cropping up in cases around the country. As with K.N., in many of these cases, it is conservative judges themselves who are raising the issue. In one major case, a Florida minor appealed a judge’s refusal to allow her an abortion under the state’s judicial-bypass law, which allows certain minors to avoid parental involvement in an abortion decision if parental notification would not be in the minors’ best interests or if they are mature enough to make the decision on their own. A panel of Florida appellate judges asked the state’s attorney general to file a friend-of-the court brief on whether the bypass violated parents’ constitutional rights, prompting the attorney general to intervene in the case. The court held that the bypass violated parents’ due process guarantees by not providing notice and an opportunity to be heard on a question that implicated important parental rights under the state and federal constitutions.

Meanwhile, in Washington, parents have filed suit to overturn a state law that established a students’ bill of rights, which includes limitations on parents’ right to access their children’s school medical records. The measure was meant, in part, to protect the privacy of vulnerable children, such as those that identify as LGBTQ+.

And in Arizona, a mother sued her school district for its failure to notify her that her child had socially transitioned genders at school. An appellate court held that the case could move forward under Arizona’s statutory parents’ bill of rights. 

Parental Rights at the U.S. Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court has also recently weighed in on the scope of parental rights. Last week, in Mirabelli v. Bonta, it blocked a California law that required schools to obtain consent from a student before disclosing to their parents if they have changed their pronouns or gender expression. The Court said the law burdened the religious exercise of parents whose “sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender” included opposition to gender transitioning and who felt “a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs.” And last June, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court held that a Maryland school district likely violated parents’ religious liberty by not allowing them to opt their children out of lessons involving LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks.

In July, meanwhile, the Court declined to review a Montana Supreme Court decision striking down a state law requiring parental consent for minors’ abortions. Justice Samual Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote separately to note that the parties hadn’t explicitly raised the issue of whether allowing minors to pursue abortion without parental consent violated the fundamental rights of parents themselves. Alito stressed that the Court’s decision not to take the case was not a rejection of that argument.

A few months later, in October, the Court denied a petition for certiorari by a group of parents challenging Colorado school policies that excluded parents from discussions about their children’s gender identities without consent of the children. Alito, joined by Thomas and Justice Neal Gorsuch, wrote that although they agreed the Court should not grant the petition, “the troubling — and tragic — allegations in this case underscore the ‘great and growing national importance’ of the question that these parent petitioners present.”

Indeed, the Court is likely to consider more parental rights cases in the years to come. A pending certiorari petition, for example, asks it to take up “whether a public school violates parents’ constitutional rights when, without parental knowledge or consent, the school encourages a student to transition to a new ‘gender’ or participates in that process.”

The Dangers of Ballooning Parental Rights

Whatever happens next in K.N., the case is a striking reminder of the dangers of new laws defining unlimited parental rights. Texas’s amendment, which could become a blueprint for others across the country, may end up expanding the scope of parental rights far beyond what voters likely understood when it was passed.

In truth, as we argue in two forthcoming law review articles, the strict scrutiny standard in Texas’s amendment and others like it represents a sharp break from both the common law and our nation’s longstanding constitutional tradition. Parents’ rights have long been given considerable weight in our legal tradition. But we defer to parents largely because we assume that they will act in their children’s best interest. Put another way, our tradition respects parental rights as a means to an end: the wellbeing of children. That means that courts have historically tempered parents’ rights by assigning weight to the state’s interest in protecting children, including in cases of abuse and neglect.

There is more than one problem with the contemporary movement for parental rights. One obvious issue is that not all parents have been treated equally. Consider that even when the risks of harm are equal, Black children are far more likely to be removed from their parents and placed in foster care than are white children. States have protected the rights of parents who object to their children learning about transgender students while curbing the rights of parents who seek gender-affirming care for their transgender children.

But parental rights absolutism is also problematic because it draws so much attention away from what children need to thrive. Strikingly, at oral argument in K.N., the justices of the Texas Supreme Court said almost nothing about the wellbeing of children. It is possible that in courts across the country, this omission will be just the beginning.

For the four children in K.N., finding against termination of the parental rights in this case could mean they would be returned to a home that has been shown to be abusive.

Mary Ziegler is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California Davis School of Law. 

Naomi Cahn is the Anthony M. Kennedy Professor of Law, and Co-Director of the Family Law Center, at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Maxine Eichner is the Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

Suggested Citation: Mary Ziegler, et al., Texas Parental Rights Amendment Threatens to Invalidate Child Abuse Laws, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (Mar. 12, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/texas-parental-rights-amendment-threatens-invalidate-child-abuse-laws