Parenting is the most difficult thing I've ever done. Since many of us have only the training that comes from watching our own parents, many of us are woefully inadequately prepared for the task. Yet, our society does not really encourage people to admit that they are struggling with parenting and thus many do not get support that could help.
My wife and I have never hit our kids (my children are 19 and 14), but that doesn't mean we have not been very structured and consistent. It has worked in the sense that we have 2 well-behaved and wonderful children -- but, don't confuse that with easy. And don't confuse this with thinking that my children are alays happy. Unfortunately, they are not. I have learned that temperment and biological differences play a huge role in who children are -- which is why I don't (or try not to) make judgments when I see other children misbehaving. It's easy to judge when you see a parent do something different than you think you would do, but I have learned that contexts are often much more complex than meet the eye. It continues to be a daily struggle to say and do the right things when you know that children need to test limits and need to feel power and control over their lives.
Sometimes we just guess and can never know for sure whether if we did it differently, would the outcome have been better... And sometimes, we lose it -- we become overwhelmed by the stresses of the day or the moment.
Anyway, unless we really want a 'Big Brother' society, we can't literally give a test for parents. Additionally, making it easy to remove children from their parents' custody is a double-edged sword if there ever was one. Children, even those with inadequate parents, usually prefer the 'known' to the 'unknown' and they still have an inherent need to know that their own parents truly love them. In other words, sometimes removal is a must, but rarely does it come without challenges that are often equal in intensity to the initial problems. It's often a 'Hobson's Choice' at best.
I think the best we can do as a society is to focus on the prevention side. Prevention means working to establish and reinforce societal norms for parental 'readiness' and emphasizing support for ahieving readiness prior to conceiving. This means education, birth control, lots of emphasis on what good parenting means and the vital importance of good parenting to our chidren and to society.
When prevention fails, we then should try to emphasize that support for parents (especially high-risk parents) is a need. One key here is to address the 'need for attention' issue -- meaning that we should stress attention as a prevention strategy rather than send the message that teenaged girls who get pregnant will get more attention than teenaged girls who don't get pregnant. We know that many teenagers opt for pregnancy out of a need to gain attention, a need to feel important, feelings of insecurity and/or wishes to get out of (or change) bad family situations. Until we remedy these issues by addressing the big needs of so many young women, we'll continue to see high rates of teen pregnancy and the continuation of the cycle of inadequate parenting.
