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Comment by parenting_ | Hacker News Reader

A controversial take.

We should consider individuals aren't able to parent their kids effectively.

Would you rather trust two exhausted individuals or a huge army of trained professionals at payroll by government to parent the kids?

There is very less transfer of knowledge and the worldview of individual parents is often limited. If there is an organization parenting thousands of kids, they can run A/B tests, see results of changing incentives, able to better respond from all data gathering and long trail of past experience. A parenting organization at scale also has more power to push through effective policy faster and change legal system to remove harmful corporations (social media in this thread).

Individual parents on other hand are inefficient, start with nothing usually, don't have enough visibility, time or expertise to consider the most optimal choices. They are helpless.

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In the US we have a system where thousands of doctors, nurses and researchers are responsible for the healthcare of soldiers, former and present.

Healthcare is a known thing. We know how to provide good healthcare. This inherently does not require innovation.

The VA is one of the most fundamentally broken and flawed systems known to man. Months and months before you can get basic care. Psychiatric care is so poor that soldiers have stupidly high rates of suicide. Basic things go misdiagnosed. There are reams of paperwork to fill out.

Do you really think we should trust kids to such a system?

Cuz we already do. Right now there are thousands of kids managed by the US government and they barely have blankets or beds. The government can barely feed them, and generally fails at showering them and clothing them.

Read into any case where a bulk group has mass raised children. Not once has it worked out. Not once.

Yeah but you can’t replace parental love so easily. So maybe a compromise solution where the government raises the children while the parents are at work in the mornings and afternoon, and the parents take over afterwards in the evening? Maybe let parents have the weekends to spend more time with their children? We can call this arrangement “public schooling”.

We could make the government portion of raising kids flexible and offer more time to parents with longer hours. Call this “extracurriculars” maybe. Thoughts on my novel idea?

While I appreciate the social cohesion and equality of opportunity such a totalitarian indoctrination and control could provide, it’s anathema to most Westerners. I would not support it.

Certainly it’s the fastest way to curb religious extremism, racism, and other social ills. Sadly it’s also the fastest way to create them.

> Certainly it’s the fastest way to curb religious extremism, racism, and other social ills.

Specifically, it eliminates extremism by extinguishing religious and cultural groups in their entirety. Under some definitions and the specific intentions/targeted groups, this can even qualify as genocide.

If you had any experience with child protection services you would know that it is just a 9 to 5 job for those people and they do not love the kids (I don't mean that harshly doctors don't cry every time a patient dies on them).

Parental love is an impossible thing to simulate.

Child protective services seem like exactly the kind of job that you cannot do if you care too much about the kids you see. For very similar reasons to the doctor example. The entire job is visiting children in terrible situations and deciding whether forcibly taking them away from their homes and families would better for them on-the-balance. If you get it wrong you might make things far worse for the very kids you want to help, and even the ideal outcome may still suck for everyone involved. Personally, I could never do it. Certainly not while keeping my sanity

Exactly. Then we'll have abolished the nuclear family and the problem of generational wealth. There will be an equitable distribution of wealth and disparities along racial, sexual, and economic lines will have evaporated.

Without generational wealth or inheritance, there will be no incentive to own property. All housing will be group housing provided in return for work. All transportation will be provided as a public utility. People will no longer have anything to hide.