There is an idea, in some circles, that parents effectively own their children. This risks leading to various abuses, and also doesn’t line up with all moral intuitions. On the other hand, most children do not have the capabilities, including executive function, to adequately evaluate and act on long-term preferences that will become important when they become adults.
I propose a rather simple-but-vague model that has no doubt been proposed before. The child is effectively held in a trust owned by their future self. The duty of the parents, therefore, is to safely deliver a well-developed adult to be inherited at the point of hand-off. They are the trust’s operators, not the trust’s owners, and thus they have a variety of duties, abilities, and limitations.
A parent can have vaccines administered. They can’t remove a significant portion of the child’s body, or demand a tattoo of their choice. They can enact ordinary disciplinary measures, but not abusive ones. They can require that the child attend school and do well at it, but they are not allowed to engage in pure ideological indoctrination. And, if they fail to meet the terms, they can be removed from administration of the metaphorical trust.
The exact details might vary. In many ways this is what people are acting on already - thus why Child Protective Services exists in the first place - but it isn’t explicitly specified. I outline it here mostly so that it can be brought up as a counter-model when people suggest either ownership of children, or treating children as atomistic adults with fully-formed executive functioning and experience.
In practice, the child wouldn’t be held in trust by the future adult, but in trust by society at large. What counts as ordinary vs abusive discipline and education but not indoctrination is inevitably defined by the local monopoly on force, because they’re the ones with the ability to remove the child in cases of breach of trust. This feels like it would gravitate towards parents being contracted childcare for the state, and a too empowered CPS could greatly restrict the space of valid parenting styles without huge outcry because they’re “protecting the children”. To some extent this is already happening e.g. the Maryland parents who almost had their kids taken away for letting them walk to school.
I’m not proposing this as a formal legal model, but rather an intuitive moral one, and mostly to counter the two other models I mentioned, which could result in child abuse or exploitation.