Having a strong social support system goes a long way. Help meet people’s basic medical needs, basic educational needs, have affordable housing, a minimum wage that people can survive upon. All of those are preferable (and well studied) methods of decreasing childhood trauma, without taking the kids away.
Where possible ensure that children are brought into the world by people in a position to emotionally and financially support them. Availability of contraception being one thing.
it is impossible to asses whether someone is emotionally able to care for children without observing them how they actually treat their own children. observing them with other children does not work either. i have seen wonderful teachers who were not so good at parenting.
requiring parents to be financially stable would cut out a way to large portion of society. you only want rich people to have kids?
how about building a society where raising children does not cost money? free schools, healthcare, financial support (basic income?) for having children, can go a long way.
same for emotional support. instead of attempting to weed out potentially bad parents, provide a support system where parents can get the help needed if they struggle with their kids.
I figured the parent comment had largely covered the societal aspect you mentioned. Public schools aren't far off free and healthcare where I live is inexpensive. Childcare is expensive but there are at least income-tested subsidies which are very helpful; free childcare seems like a good goal.
With the emotional and financial angle, I was getting at abortion as well as contraceptives and sex education. If an individual/couple get pregnant but they themselves don't feel they are emotionally or financially prepared, pushing them down that path (especially with poor support) immediately puts them and their child behind the eight ball. Obviously it's a particularly contentious topic in some countries.
I can't find the link now, but I was reading stats about foster children the other day which were quite incredible. Encouraging an environment where children are with parents who want them seems like something we should aim for.
I think most of the commenters here are probably more interested in talking about the middle ground between “taking kids away from parents” and “abortion”.
i agree that people who don't want children should get help to make it easier to not have children accidentally.
but wanting children and being emotionally fit to take care of them are not the same thing. and denying someone the right to have children is completely inappropriate, as is trying to convince them that they are not capable.
This furthers the huge amount of resources society puts into the positional good known as education. If you make X level of education free and universal the X+1 level will soon become mandatory for a decent job even if it's irrelevant to the work.
> healthcare
This is a bottomless pit. A gov can spend almost arbitrarily large amounts of money on this (easily orders of magnitude more than total GDP), so you'll need to put a limit on it in some way.
if you make X level of education free and universal the X+1 level will soon become mandatory for a decent job even if it's irrelevant to the work.
not true. the US is the fourth highest country in number of students with tertiary education. notably europe (eg germany which has always had free universities) has only half as many students (and those even include trade-schools, which are absolutely relevant for work)
what possibly drives irrelevant higher education is high unemployment. if there are lots of applicants to choose from, you may tend to choose the higher educated ones. reduce unemployment and demand for lesser educated people should rise.
healthcare: This is a bottomless pit
literally ever country in the world spends less on healthcare than the US.
the limit on spending comes from insurance and governments not allowing exploitation by healthcare providers.
If “education” is considered a “positional good” then it’s not an “education” in the sense I meant it above and in the sense that it’s meant when considering societal wellbeing.
To see it that way you’d either have to have too little or too much of it. I doubt you’ve had so little education that you see no real value in it. So I guess you’ve been privileged with so much of it that the marginal cost of more education for you doesn’t provide any further value. Fair enough - for you.
Education in the normal sense of the word is valuable in itself, regardless of the value other people place in it. If that’s not your experience you’re very much doing it wrong and should stop.
You can't go all the way to escalating to remove children from their parents care, but then who are they to be cared by? Other abuse victims.
It's very easy to say "prevent x from occurring", but then there's people and religion, and politics, and culture, and...