While parents are not property of their children, they are responsible for creating a human that is dependent on the parent for survival. It is now their moral responsibility to take care of the child.
As far as who makes caretaking decisions, standard of living and parental 'rights', I think this is all resolved if start respecting the will of children. If a child can choose to leave their parent and go with a new willing caretaker, I don't think we would have to worry about concrete beds and prison diets. If there is disagreement on how to care for a child, tiebreaker should be the will of the child. I think that is the point of this article and others like it. Children are people. Respect them as other human beings.
The will of the child cannot be relied upon for the first 5+ years of their life. An abused child will "choose" to stay because "fear of the unknown" is worse than the abuse they have.
The point of my comment is that while parent's shouldn't use violence, they have no obligation to do anything for the child beyond keeping them alive. A child who does not obey can be denied freedom of movement (grounded), denied toys, and they can be denied all but minimal food necessary to keep them alive, etc.
All of these tactics are non-violent, yet they can have far greater psychological impact on the kids than a slap or spanking.
I am an advocate of non-violent solutions to problems, but the issue of kids/elderly/disabled is one that is very hard to resolve in an objective way.
Oh, I disagree. What about loving the child, teaching them good manners (subjective, I know), promoting a nurturing environment for the child (emotional, social, physical, etc), to name but a few?
If all a parent does is keep the child alive, to me that is not a very good parent.
If tossing someone in a dark corner, denying them movement, contact with other humans, learning opportunities, sunlight, more than the bare minimum maintenance food, recreational time (and so on) is non-violent, then I do not think "non-violent" means so much anymore.
I usually agree with and enjoy reading your views on random stuff (from way before steemit even existed), but on this I will have to disagree 100% - unless I grossly misunderstood you.
Actually, I think your second and last paragraphs can give us the answer to these problems. Is society OK with doing the things in paragraph 2 to the elderly and disabled? If not, then it is not okay to do those things to children. That is the point of this article and others like it. Children are not some sub species of human. The idea of punishments and gaining compliance through fear, intimidation and/or pain needs to become obsolete and shamed.