IN LOCO PARENTIS

—A Council Dictionary Entry

IN LOCO PARENTIS (Latin term)

[1] In the place of the parent; not the natural parent but someone temporarily occupying the parental role; a legal guardian when the natural parents are absent.

Example:

On the death of Bob and Cindy, the court most likely would have appointed Uncle Buck to act IN LOCO PARENTIS, granting him legal guardianship of the children.

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[2] Providing, informally, the role and function of a parent in matters of advisement, reassurance, or emotional support.

Example 1:

Bob acted IN LOCO PARENTIS when he listened patiently to Siggy Marvin’s confession of existential angst.

(In the movie, WHAT ABOUT BOB?, Bob comforts the psychiatrist’s son during an existential crisis—momentarily in loco parentis, permanently loco, and nonetheless acting in the boy’s best interest.)

Example 2:

The Swahili proverb “Asiyefunzwa na mamae hufunzwa na ulimwengu” (“He who is not taught by his mother will be taught by the world”) took on new meaning when the entire village of Flatbush acted IN LOCO PARENTIS, filming and providing moral support during the recent merciless beating of a Brooklyn girl by multiple young female villagers.

Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn — where the 17th century keeps watch over the 20th.
The ancestors sleep beneath the trees. The Kings Theatre glows across the street. On this very scene a young girl was once set upon by feral teenths. H. P. Lovecraft set his tale “The Hound” here—and sometimes the city reminds us why.

Example 3:

In 1996 Hillary Clinton popularized the slogan, drawn from the book of the same name, “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child.” This laid the groundwork for her later campaign to become President. In a long line of leaders who have attempted to act IN LOCO PARENTIS to their respective nations, Ma Hillary hoped to join her unacknowledged Uncle Joe in overseeing the care and welfare of the country.

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[3] In modern reinterpretation, loco derives from the Spanish word loco, meaning insane—named after the infamous loco-weed which causes horses and cattle to stagger and behave erratically when grazed upon.

Parentis, meanwhile, is derived from the surname of the progressive writer Michael Parenti, well known for denying the excesses of Uncle Joe’s gulag system—widely regarded as the Soviet Union’s early experimental form of the modern parental strategy known as “time-out.”

(Parenti itself derives from the Italian word for kin or family.)

In the Stalinist household, the State stood in loco parentis.
The time-out corner began on the Roads to Moscow and extended roughly six thousand miles east.

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—Other famous figures who have acted IN LOCO PARENTIS

William S. Burroughs — father figure to Beat Generation acolytes and subsequent avant-garde-tards such as Iggy Pop.

God the Father — despite a somewhat erratic disciplinary style during his earlier career under the name Yahweh.

Gaia, or Mother Earth — whose devoted children maintain that she does everything for their well-being despite volcanoes, earthquakes, pestilence, and periodic flooding.

Ma Barker — maternal organizer of an informal Midwestern gangster family during the 1930s.

Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Baron von Münchausen (1720–1797) — German nobleman, soldier, and huntsman who generously donated his name to the famous psychological condition Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy, the medical term for the parental urge carried to its logical extreme.