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Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in an answer, read the rather long article. Sometimes it's good to leave the comfortable bubble most of us live in.

It says that in the case of Romania, warehousing children was a disaster on the scale of Dachau in WW2.

Psychology textbooks had to be rewritten afterwards as this level of child neglect was never contemplated - no biological or custodial parents to pattern their behavior.

One observation I'll make is that although adoption is considered a noble act in the US, many other countries consider it be throwing your baby away to be exploited.

People that I've talked to in the Philippines and Indonesia visibly recoiled when I mentioned the word "adoption", so there must be an unfortunate history there.

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I know that of course this Romanian example isn't. We used to send a truck full of help for the Romanian kids two decades back every year or so.

But that is not proof it can't work, just like how one bad parent isn't proof all parents are bad.

But a skilled government can gather more data and insights than any one individual, so it stands too reason they could produce a program that's better than what many or most parents can come up with on their own. In fact, that is precisely how modern day education ages 4-16 started out. Near universal literacy is one of its fruits. Why not more?

Supernatural intelligence does not exist and in particular it does not emerge from bureaucracies.

Then what is primary and secondary schooling about? While not perfect, it emerges from bureaucracy and it does achieve things that many parents did not (such as literacy).

I would argue that secondary schooling is worse the more bureauceacy is involved, and mostly exists as a prison for kids/young adults so society doesn't have to do anything with them.

Primary schooling is fine, as long as everyone comes out literate and numerate.

But don't start too early either:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201003...

I would say schools in general are more about warehousing kids than learning, although some kids do end up learning things they wouldn't have otherwise (while others end up not being able to learn things they would have learned otherwise).

Related to this discussion, several secular intentional communities in the US have attempted communal child raising and as far as I am aware all stopped after finding it to be worse than having parents be primary caregivers. Twin Oaks is the one I remember by name if anyone wants to go looking for info; I know their experience has been written about in books, I don't know if there is anything online. I am sure there were at least two other such attempts but I can't remember the communities right now. It seems kids really need at least one and not too many primary caregivers.

Foster care in the few states I know about in the US has serious problems. The interests of governments are not usually aligned with the interests of humans.

Parents do learn from the experiences of other parents and people everywhere are always looking for ways to do that better, but there are enough things that just don't work well that being too organized about it is likely to be counterproductive.

You should read the article first. What you're saying is the opposite of what the article is about, which is thousands of infants left in state orphanages.

OK, indeed, the slogan "the state can take better care of your child than you can" does not in fact apply to the atrocity that the article covers. That slogan is classical Soviet-style double speak.

> One observation I'll make is that although adoption is considered a noble act in the US, many other countries consider it be throwing your baby away to be exploited.

Adoption is considered a noble act in Romania

But we also have a history of adoptions where the kids ended up exploited.

After the scandals, international adoptions were banned until recently.

So why were thousands of children sent to state orphanages, if adoption was normal?

There's some kind of disconnect here where it seems like Romanians are brigading on my post without actually reading the article.

Something being a noble act does not mean that it is normal, in the sense that it is a common occurence. In fact, the opposite is usually true.

There were just so many abandoned children that there were too few people willing to adopt them. Most people prefer to conceive their own children rather than adopting. Eve of those that want to adopt, they will often conceive a child before feeling ready to go through the adoption process, and few people can afford more than one child.

Different times. GP used present tense.

Maybe the difference is that the Americans consider adopting (receiving) a child to be noble where as the Filipinos consider giving your own child to adoption negativly? I don't think a lot of Americans consider giving their children to adoption as noble.

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