NASARA JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

Across Nigerian households, parental authority is exercised within a complex web of cultural expectation, religious obligation, and communal accountability. Yet this authority is frequently distorted into domination - through child labour, early marriage, gender-based educational denial, and the suppression of children's developing autonomy. This paper argues that these failures cannot be adequately addressed without philosophical grounding, and that John Locke's account of parental duty as a temporary fiduciary trust provides precisely the framework that is needed. Drawing on Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Some Thoughts Concerning Education, the paper argues that parental authority is not a form of ownership but a conditional and time-limited responsibility directed toward the child's preservation, education, and eventual autonomy. Applying this framework to the Nigerian context, the paper identifies unexpected convergences between Lockean liberal philosophy and indigenous communal child-rearing traditions, while also exposing the ways in which structural poverty, patriarchal custom, and institutional weakness systematically violate children's developmental rights. The paper concludes that the reform of family practice in Nigeria requires not only changes in individual parental conduct but the transformation of the social and political conditions that make responsible fiduciary parenting impossible for many families.

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