Phillipe Aries’ (in)famous work on the history of childhood offers a constructivist account of childhood and its cognates, family and parenthood. Inventions of the early modern period, we are led to believe that there is nothing immutable or ineluctable about their being, shape or form. They represent social forms of organisation which enable the polity to realise and maintain its organic shape and purposefulness; that view that the social whole is greater than the sum of the parts has suffused Western thought from Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics) to Durkheim. Using the example of Kubaili Khan it will be argued that this is not confined to Western thought, neither to conquering peoples but has endured in various forms, subtle and less subtle in liberal democratic polities through the ages. In Aristotle and the Necessity of Public Education, Randall Curren approvingly suggests that for himself, as for Aristotle, the State has a super ordinate right and obligation to provide education for its children. Yet, like the Mongols, the impulse remains one borne of a distrust of parents. Ironically, as Brenda Almond suggests, the family and all it entails may be seen as a kind of glue which holds the state together and its disintegration, precipitated in part by the state ever more voracious encroachments may be in the process of so fatally undermining a set of relations upon which its own health and sustainability depends. Using the ongoing and very live debate about the permissibility and desirability of home schooling as a context, this study will attempt to map and understand this complex relationship between the state and parents. Why it is, for example, that a state can so undermine its own foundational conditions. How it is that it increasingly holds to the view that parents themselves are in need of education and consequently are not competent to rear their own children. Clearly such an exercise demands that we understand that states themselves differ and part of the task, in comparing such differing attitudes is to understand how different states understand their own identity as well as the nature of parenthood.