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Comment by danharaj | Hacker News Reader

What if we raised our children as a society instead of turning it into an adversarial sector of the economy that is dictated by the interests of politicians, military leaders, factory owners, and every other adult who sees power to be apprehended and utilized when they see a child?

I share your compassion for your children, for all children really.

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> What if we raised our children as a society

This presumes that we could come to any sort of group consensus "as a society" on how to raise our children.

America at least already attempts, futilely, to our detriment I believe, to do so with its incredibly bureaucratic and hierarchical institutions. You either surrender your child to the maw of the state or you're rich enough to buy your own resources for your child though mental wellness of kids at such high powered schools tend to be bad too; I don't think the rich can buy their way to better schooling either. All of this is a 'consensus' of some sort.

The consensus I would like to see is one of decentralization and autonomy: Autonomy for children, autonomy for teachers, autonomy for communities to take care of their children as they see fit, where their consensus is reached by their own methods; let us imagine a truly democratic means of human organization.

Under our current systems, children are seen as barely anything more than property of parents who must obey the regulations of a government that sees children as manpower and the grist to feed the economy. At best a child can belong to a family with wealth to manage, where they can be elevated to the status of capital investment.

Am I being too cynical? I am clearly ignoring all the wonderful things we think about children. But that's the point. The all-suffocating grip of our economics and our politics squeezes the humanity and color out of every body.

Well, quite a few European countries have taken the approach of building an environment that somewhat devalues personal gain (through higher taxes) but drastically reduces fiscal insecurity (through free education, healthcare, extended parental leave etc.) in order to make it relatively easy to raise a family.

Their birth rates are generally lower than US birth rates.

According to this[1], that seems to be true for Germany, but the other rich European countries (western and northern) are pretty close to the USA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_birth_rat...

Thanks for looking it up!

There need to be no one true consensus. I lecture children being violent towards others, or destroying things, or running in next to the swimming pool. Other people have a different limit. The point is that children learn that there is a world outside their home with a different ruleset.

Most of the time the parent are embarrassed they didn't react first, but only rarely do they throw a hissy fit.

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