Parent v. Child is a satirical publication. It is a website. It is written by one Editor, who prefers to remain unnamed for reasons of household diplomacy, and who does not hold a law degree or a license to practice law in any jurisdiction. The publication has no offices, no staff, no filing system, and no letterhead beyond the one displayed at the top of this page. It is, in the fullest sense of the word, just a website.
The Journal exists to dramatize — with as straight a face as the Editor can manage — a category of lawsuit that is technically available under American law and almost universally ill-advised: the civil action brought by a parent against their own minor child. The joke, such as it is, lies in the collision between the seriousness of legal process and the absurdity of its application here. It also lies in the quieter, load-bearing fact that such a lawsuit, if won, would almost always be paid for by the winning party out of their own household funds. We find this funny. We suspect you do too, or you would have clicked away by now.
A Brief History of the Publication
The Journal was founded in 2019, in the kitchen of a home in the Midwest, at approximately 9:47 PM, following a prolonged negotiation over bedtime. The Editor — whose name we decline to disclose on the grounds that they do not want their children to learn about this site until they are adults and financially independent — drafted the Journal's first editorial statement on the back of a grocery receipt. It read, in its entirety: "Someone should write about this."
From this modest charter the Journal has grown into a thoroughly irregular editorial operation with, at present count, one writer, one reader (the writer), and a circulation figure best described as aspirational. We publish when provoked, which is more often than we would like, and less often than our children's behavior would seem to warrant.
A Note on the Voice
The Journal's voice — formal, serif-heavy, fond of Roman numerals and Latin and the conventions of boutique legal publications — is a choice. We have found that comedy about the law works best when the setting is as serious as possible and the pretext is as ridiculous as possible. When we tell you, with a straight face, that we have catalogued the reasonable market value of twelve years' worth of unmade beds, the humor lands in the gap between the formality of the framing and the triviality of the grievance. This is a very old joke structure — Swift was doing it in 1729, when he proposed eating the poor — and we do not pretend to have improved on it.
We also think there is something quietly instructive here. The reason the civil suit against your own minor child is a bad idea is not that the law forbids it. It is that the economics of the American family make the action self-defeating. Minors, in substantially every jurisdiction, lack capacity to own meaningful assets; their parents remain legally responsible for their welfare and for many of their debts; and the "damages" being sought almost always originate, on net, from the very household that would collect them. You cannot, mathematically, come out ahead. The joke is the math. The math is the joke.
What This Publication Is Not
This site is not legal advice. It is not a source of legal information on which any reader should rely for any purpose. Nothing published here should be treated as a reliable statement of the law in any jurisdiction, and several things published here are contradicted by the law in every jurisdiction we are aware of. If you are presently in a legal dispute — including but especially a dispute that involves a family member — we urge you to consult an attorney admitted to practice in your state. We can recommend no specific attorney, because we know none of them; but we can confirm, with near-total certainty, that any real attorney will be more useful than this publication.
This site is also not a law firm, a news outlet, a legal blog, a lawyer-referral service, a support group, or a substitute for therapy. It is a humor website about a legal premise. If you find any of it useful beyond its intended purpose of providing modest amusement, please consider that you may be taking it too seriously, and close the tab gently.
On the Domain Name
A word, because it has occasionally been asked about. The Journal is hosted at a domain considerably more direct than its editorial voice might suggest. The URL — a compact imperative, roughly five letters too long to be mistaken for subtlety — was selected because it is memorable, because it is available, and because there is a comic pleasure in the gap between a vulgar popular title and the mock-gentility of the publication it announces. Readers occasionally arrive expecting one thing and stay for the other. We consider this a feature.