How to encourage bad parents to stop having kids?
Stuff reports:
Some families who have come to the attention of authorities may be stopped from having more children by the Government.
Social Development Minister Anne Tolley told TVNZ’s Q+A said she expected the panel looking at restructuring Child, Youth and Family would recommend getting faster contraceptive advice to some families.
“We should be offering, you know, tubal ligations, all sorts of things and counselling those families’,” she said the panel would likely say.
Tolley acknowledged it would be a “huge step” for the state to start telling people that they could not have another child, but said it was “a conversation that New Zealanders, perhaps, need to have”.
Some families that had been involved with government agencies needed more contraceptive advice, she said on Q+A.
“I mean, I know of cases that CYF have taken the sixth and seventh baby from.
“The question I’ve asked is, ‘So what advice now is going into that parent?'”
Tolley did not rule out limiting or preventing some families from having another child, but said she would wait to see what the panel recommended in December.
Broadly I guess there are four ways you can discourage bad (as in parents who abuse and neglect their kids parents from having further children.
- Education and counselling
- Positive incentives (pay them not to have more kids or get sterilisied)
- Negatives incentives (no further welfare if they have further children
- Coercion (forced sterilization, automatic confiscation of further kids)
I don’t support forced sterilization. We simply should not give any Government that power.
There is now provision for a Judge to rule that any further children will be taken into care the moment they’re born. Too early to know if this will be effective.
I’m interested in a combination of two and three. Where a parent has a track record of abuse and neglect, you give them an incentive to get sterilised, and/or also make clear further children doesn’t mean more welfare.