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mattnewport comments on Mandating Information Disclosure vs. Banning Deceptive Contract Terms - Less Wrong
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There may be an argument for purely paternalistic restrictions on freedom of contract but you haven't made it here. You've simply cited an example of getting a friend to accept paternalistic restrictions in a rather literal way (over his actual son), you haven't presented a justification for paternalistic restrictions.
Most legal systems consider that certain categories of people are not capable of entering into legally binding contracts due to not being competent to judge their own interests. Children and the mentally ill are commonly treated this way. Extending the concept of capacity to the merely unintelligent leads in some troubling directions.
This story wasn't the main point of the post, but its purpose was to illustrate that it's pretty easy to imagine something in between purely voluntary and coerced at gunpoint. People can be manipulated into "voluntarily" doing things that hurt them, even if they are not tricked or lied to. This merely raises the possibility of beneficial paternalistic intervention; it certainly doesn't establish that the benefits of such intervention outweigh the costs. Here are some old posts on that subject, for whatever interest it may have.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/heres_my_openin.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/disagreement_ca_2.html