Great post. The only thing I'd add is that I don't think this is held over from older versions of childrearing; not just in right-wing families but in all families (to varying extents, with varying degrees of awareness), children are instruments to be used for a purpose. Nowadays that purpose is more likely to be symbolic and emotional than "I need children to work on the farm." But being a tool is the same subjective experience, whether you're being used for your physical labor or your emotional labor.
The authoritarian family (and all families are authoritarian, even the most liberal and loving ones, since the threat of "if you leave, I'll call the cops to bring you back" is never absent) carries out some of the functions of the authoritarian state, by producing workers to be fed into the capitalist economy, and that's where the "I need children to work on the farm" thing comes back: you probably don't own your own farm, but the economy does need your children in order to sustain itself, and if you believe (for example) that wage work confers dignity and you need to teach your child the value of hard work, that serves both your own emotional/moral goals and the state's economic goals.
Likewise, the state reinforces the family in some obvious ways: public education (it's not a coincidence that that's being continually privatized and pared down to the bare minimum for sustaining the reproduction of labor), welfare (which has been cut back even more aggressively), the administrative recognition of marriage, and most clearly, the "child welfare" system -- which is really a system for protecting parental property rights unless you're a minoritized and poor person whose children must be harvested from you because you're seen as incapable of turning the raw material of your child into a productive worker -- and police power that insures children can't leave their families (unless, same.)
So I don't think the family works this way because it's an old habit that people have forgotten to break. Authoritarianism renews and reshapes itself all the time.
This is also why queer and trans people are a threat to institutions, which conservatives openly acknowledge and liberals acknowledge through rhetoric that forcibly assimilates queer and trans people into institutions ("love is love", "born this way", etc.) It's perceived that queer and trans people don't produce children (inaccurate) and that queer and trans people are more likely to produce children who won't enter gladly into the patriarchal-parent-to-patriarchal-boss pipeline (probably accurate).
I owe much of what I'm able to say here to the writing and teaching of Sophie Lewis, without whom I wouldn't be able to say, without qualification: abolish the family.
because in their minds, we cause their queer and trans children to defect from their perfectly controlled family and community (instead of un-accepting parents being the cause of the defection). Because if you don't know what being gay, being trans is? It's much easier for social repression to just keep you rationalizing it in other ways while still being miserable.
But returning to another point, the other reason for the right to encourage more children and "regulate the things that may cause people to stray", is, if you're playing the long game, in 18 years they're a vote for your side, and you can produce a lot of those, if you're dedicated or manipulate your community into being dedicated. They're grooming entire communities into a dedicated voting block:
- "make sure you know what your kids are learning in school, because liberal schools keep sneaking pornography into literature class"
- "make sure to have your child give you their logins and passwords for social media accounts"
- "know the parents of your kids' social media friends"
- "limit their own screen time to a few hours a day"
- "try days where they can't have any screen time, and are instead encouraged to play outside"
- "try to limit your own screen time and have family discussions instead -- remember, parents are the leaders of the household and need to be teachers, while also helping your children remain inspired by leadership, compassion, and discipline"
keep being recurring themes I've seen in the christofashy pediatrics interest group leak as handouts for doctors to inform parents, and all of them are about limiting or inspiring doubt about information sources that aren't the parents or the right. Because information is dangerous and can cause people to defect