In a previous post I outlined three schools of thought on the relationship between parents and political authority. One of those schools of thought sees parents as a rival power base to political authority that must be overcome. This is the perspective of communist and leftist movements that view the influence of parents on their children as a barrier to State power.
This group sees children as property of the State. By separating parents from their children, parents can be more easily controlled and children more easily indoctrinated by the State. One strategy of those who want to separate parents from children is to advocate communal child rearing.
The earliest advocate of communal child rearing was Plato, who set this out in The Republic. Plato wanted the State to become the central focus of commitment instead of the family, possibly influenced by the example of Sparta using this policy for the same goal.
The abolition of the family has been an explicit goal of all communist movements and is stated in The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels (1848). It was also advocated by pre-Marxist communists such as Morelly in his La Code de la Nature, (1755). Although Rousseau did not call for full communal child rearing, his critique of the family led many that he influenced, such as Morelly, to see this as a solution.
The goal of abolishing the family was advocated by Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex (1970) and by various others since as a perennial aim of radical leftist movements. What the abstract goal of "abolishing the family" means in terms of specific policy is compulsory separation of children from their parents and raising of children in communal groups organised by the State.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead argued for removing the children from parents as part of her critique of the nuclear family. She presented a positive depiction of Samoa where she argued that the "large family community" of communal child-rearing "diffuses" affection and prevents the formation of the "crippling attitudes which have been labelled Oedipus complexes, Electra complexes, and so on". Mead's goal was "to mitigate… the strong role which parents play in children's lives."
Contemporary philosophers Brighouse & Swift advocated breaking the relationship between biological parents and their children in pursuit of egalitarianism. Rather than specifically advocating communal child rearing, they make a more general argument against the view that children should be raised by their biological parents. They argue that "adults have no fundamental right to parent their own biological children". They see being a parent as a benefit that should ideally be distributed in a more egalitarian way, so they argue that non-parents such as homosexuals, single people, and polyamorous groups should have access to children to experience the benefit of raising kids too. They argue that the claim children have a right to be raised by their biological parents should be opposed as prejudice.
Moderate leftists such as Brighouse & Swift advocate incrementally more separation of children from their biological parents, whereas radicals such as Marx want total abolition of the family.
There may be other motivations for the advocacy of communal child rearing, but for some it is a conscious strategy to separate parents from their children and thereby attack the family as rival power base to the State.