"But you wouldn't be hearing this "I'm higher than you in the pecking order and don't you dare forget it" attitude that is so very common."

The human race is, essentially, a species of upgraded monkeys, and there is (so far as I can see) no way to have two large groups of people, one of which strictly dominates the other, without this particular monkey behavior being ubiquitous. This holds true even when the child, in some sense, has higher utility (eg., when the parents would sacrifice their lives for their child's life, as parents often do). The only real alternative is to give children as a whole higher status, by, say, rewriting the laws so that children are not essentially their parent's property.