By: Sue Lani Madsen | Special to unDivided

Washington parents are frustrated over the attempted gutting of the Parents’ Bill of Rights. Two bills moving through the Washington legislature effectively erase the 15 rights enumerated in current law and replace the Parents’ Bill of Rights with a list of “student rights, parental and guardian rights, employee protections, and requirements for state and local education entities . . . and declaring an emergency,” according to House Bill 1296. A similar bill working its way through the other chamber, Senate Bill 5181, also includes an emergency clause that protects it from a voter referendum.

By trying to gut the law approved by initiative, parents are waking up to how Washington Democrats have written them out of their children’s lives. Like the now viral video clip from Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D-Seattle), majority leader of the Washington Senate Democrats:

“Kids over the age of 13 have the complete right to make their own decisions about their mental health care, parents don’t have a right to have notice, they don’t have a right to have consent about that.”

It’s an incredibly stupid policy. 13-year-olds have to be reminded to go to bed, go to school, do their homework, shut the door, take a shower, or “get out of the shower, you’re using all the hot water!” 13-year-olds are not well-known for their ability to make and keep medical appointments. 13-year-olds prescribed medication rely on parents to remind them when to take it, what and what not to take it with, and rescue them from adverse reactions.

In short, 13-year-olds need involved parents to thrive (and even survive).

But unfortunately, Pedersen was mostly correct. As he auto-responded to concerned constituents emailing his office last week, “That is the law in Washington and has been for 40 years.”

Rep. Travis Couture (R-Allyn) calls this deceptive and misleading. While Pedersen was technically right, he ignores the impact of healthcare mission-creep imposed by a Democratic party increasingly dragged into the swamp by its extreme left wing.

In Washington state, what started out in 1985 as a law allowing high school kids to talk to the school counselor without first calling their parents has turned into Senate Majority Leader Pedersen saying on national television, “if they’re old enough to get pregnant, they’re old enough to make decisions about their own bodies.”

Apparently, Pedersen thinks girls can make their own healthcare decisions as long as they’re menstruating, so a girl as young as eight or nine years old doesn’t need her parents’ support if she winds up pregnant. The school can tell her to lie, because according to Pedersen's standard she’s old enough to make decisions about her own body.

And parents must also be lied to by everyone in the school if their daughter has suddenly become confused about her gender after being exposed to a progressive sexual health curriculum and teachers intent on social indoctrination.

That’s not hypothetical. It happened in the Olympia School District with a 10-year-old girl in Ms. Jennifer Knight’s 5th grade class at Centennial Elementary. The unDivided podcast has the interviews and the receipts.

This year’s attempts to gut the Parents’ Bill of Rights have highlighted what parents of kids struggling with mental health challenges already knew. Once your child hits the magic age of 13, they can go it on their own.

“Mental health needs to be taken very seriously,” said one frustrated mother who spoke on condition of anonymity for her daughter’s sake. Her daughter was in treatment, mom was part of a successful treatment plan until 13 and then just like that, a fragile child was left to make her own decisions. “A 13-year-old can be severely depressed and ordered an anti-depressant, then refuse to take them. If a parent isn’t aware, how can they watch for increased risk behavior? And mental health professionals don’t necessarily follow through,” said this mother.

Who do you believe will be a child’s best advocate? An involved parent who worries about her daughter 24/7/365 or a mental health professional with a caseload of dozens of patients and a teacher who sees her at most 180 days a year?

When my own daughter was 13, I got an immediate notification while I was out of town at a meeting. That afternoon, a group of girls had reported sexual harassment, the school was investigating, and a deputy would be visiting in the morning to take her statement. I was home that night and with her in the morning. I can’t imagine being kept in the dark.

Under the law as it stands today, parents have a right “To receive immediate notification if a criminal action is deemed to have been committed against their child or by their child,” like I did. That’s simple, obvious and common sense.

Children don’t live at school; they live at home with their families. In the version of HB 1296 passed by Democrats on the House Education Committee, schools get up to 48 hours to notify parents. Two days of lying to parents by omission?

Of course, there are bad home environments out there – and bad parents. Sometimes those are the kids your kids bring home because they need a meal and a place to sleep. But the same Democratic majority that wants to let the school wait up to 48 hours before calling you – you who have done no wrong and are under no suspicion – also wants to reduce the penalty for cooking meth in front of minors and make it more difficult to remove kids from those very dysfunctional homes. That is nonsensical.

On the Senate side, Democrats amended SB 5181 to take out the 48 hour wait and put the "immediate" notification requirement back before passing it, a minor victory for common sense.

But both bills would still repeal parents’ rights to be notified of any medical care offered to their children, medication provided, or follow-up care required because 13-year-olds are great at organizing their lives without their parents’ involvement. (Insert eyeroll here, the kind your teenager gives you when you remind him to wash the dishes or tell her take out the trash.)

The Parents’ Bill of Rights was approved by nearly a half-million Washington voters who signed Initiative 2081, and by the Washington legislature, where the Democrats were for it in 2024 before deciding they are against it in 2025. As one frustrated parent testified in Olympia during the first public hearing for HB 1296, it's like "taking a sledgehammer to democracy."

SB 5181 passed the Senate and is waiting for a hearing in the House Education Committee, the same committee that approved a 48-hour waiting period and voted down an amendment to bring parents in immediately. No word on when it will be heard.

HB 1296 is lingering in the House Rules Committee and may die there. Speaker Laurie Jinkins (D-Tacoma) who chairs the committee did not respond to a request for a status on the bill and Republicans are as usual shut out of the process.

But you aren’t. Flood your representatives with your opinion through the legislative website. Let them know you want the Parents’ Bill of Rights to remain the law.

You can submit your position on HB 1296 here:
https://app.leg.wa.gov/pbc/bill/1296

You can submit your position on SB 5181 here:
https://app.leg.wa.gov/pbc/bill/5181

About the author:

Sue Lani Madsen calls herself an accidental journalist after 30 years as an architect. She spent nine years as a weekly columnist for the Spokesman-Review, writing about public policy and other topics reflecting her experience in agriculture as a rancher, rural healthcare and urban disaster response as an EMT, and wildland fire and forest policy as a firefighter. She publishes on Substack and The Center Square. She will also be contributing her expertise to unDivided's coverage of the 2025 Legislative Session. Sue Lani lives on a ranch west of Spokane with husband Craig, 200 plus goats and three dogs.