Good Farmers and Disdainful Children: Developmental Orthodoxy, the Figure of the Child, and American Law

This paper introduces the concept of "developmental orthodoxy" to analyze how American law governs children's futures by sorting developmental trajectories into orthodox and heretical categories. Through a close reading of Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) alongside Tennessee's 2023 ban on gender-affirming care for minors, I trace how the figure of the child operates in legal reasoning as a site where the state's investment in futurity becomes visible. In Yoder, the Court celebrated Amish parents' right to withdraw children from formal education because their alternative schooling produced "good farmers and good citizens"; in Tennessee, the state overrides parental authority to prevent treatments that "might encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex." Drawing on Lauren Berlant's work on citizenship and futurity and Lee Edelman's concept of reproductive futurism, I argue that both cases reveal the state functioning as arbiter of which children, and which futures, merit legal protection.