On the second day, we were told we could go home.

We stuffed our snacks, blankets, wet wipes, and nappies into whatever bags we could, and we shuffled back to the car. There he was — a newborn baby in a Winnie-the-Pooh onesie and a cute cap, strapped into a car seat that made him look like a Lilliputian. I’ve never driven home so carefully or slowly as that night. I’m sorry to anyone stuck behind me.

I thought then, and I still think now, how mad it is that, at least in British society, we just give people a baby and hope things will turn out all right. “There you go, good luck, try not to screw it up.” You get a few pages of faded printouts, four free evening classes, and a number to call if you need anything. But the rest is up to you.

A few weeks ago, I spoke to philosopher David Archard about the philosophy of parenting. Here’s how he put it:

“Churchill famously said democracy was a terrible form of government, but it was better than all the rest, and I think you might say, well, the family is a pretty terrible way of raising children for all the reasons that psychoanalysts, anthropologists, and feminists have said, but nevertheless it looks better than the alternatives if you’re thinking about ways to bring up children.”

You can hear our full interview here.

In other words, it is mad that we just give a kid to new parents after a few token days’ training. But the alternatives are worse. So, this week, I thought it would be interesting to look at just some of those alternatives.

Plato’s common children

In his Republic, Plato lays out how he thinks a perfect society should be run. The entire book is a kind of utopian manifesto. The most famous part of his vision is what has come to be known as the “Philosopher Kings.” Plato argued that we should divide society into three units: the Workers (who produce things), the Auxiliaries (who guard things), and the Guardians (who run things).

Plato outlines the essential characteristics of each: Workers need to be diligent, Auxiliaries need to be brave, and Guardians, most of all, need to be entirely impartial and fair. The Guardians are about justice, and justice can have absolutely no bias.

The big problem, though, is children: Even the most coldly rational Philosopher Kings among a population tend to love their kids. We’ll save our own children over others. We would die — and possibly kill — to protect our families. And so, Plato suggested we do something a touch dramatic: Women and children should “belong” to everyone. Take kids away and raise them in a state-run nursery “so that no parent will know his own offspring or any child his parent.”

Bingo. Job done. No messy biases, emotional outbursts, or unjust partiality. The Guardians can get on with their job without having to worry about school pickups or anything so distracting as parental love.

The Oneida Community’s selective breeding experiment

In the late 19th century, there was a radical religious sect known as the Oneida Community. The Oneida were led by a charismatic Christian known as John Humphrey Noyes. But Noyes wasn’t your usual evangelical fanatic who denied science and denounced rival philosophies. Quite the opposite: He was hugely inspired by his reading of Plato’s Republic and the science of his day — especially Charles Darwin.

Twenty years before Francis Galton would use the term eugenics, Noyes was one of the first Americans to encourage a form of selective breeding. Within a few decades, eugenics would become quite popular in America.

Noyes’ “stirpiculture” experiment (“stirps” is a Latin agricultural term for “stock”) meant that men and women were paired off based on how intelligent or spiritually awakened they were. Between 1869 and 1879, 58 children were born under the stirpiculture system.

For their first year, babies were left with their biological mothers – mostly for the practical issues of breastfeeding and general care. But any “stickiness” was discouraged. Mothers shouldn’t bond with their child any more than any other member of the community. Then, when the babies became toddlers, they were taken away to the Children’s House to be raised by trained childcarers and the community more broadly.

Noyes’s vision was to create a society where everyone was married to each other. Every child belonged to everyone else. There could be no divisions in a community-wide love. Unfortunately for Noyes, his stirpiculture policy was one cause of the Oneida’s downfall. It turns out you cannot just turn off parental “stickiness” like a switch. Parents favored their biological kids. And by 1881, the Oneida Community was all but disbanded.

The Orphan Train Movement

Almost all modern liberal societies have a form of child protection system. If a parent is harming their children, then the state takes away their children, and the parents are often charged with a crime. The level of state involvement varies. In some cultures, the bar for “neglect” is relatively low. In others, a parent has to be seriously cruel or neglectful to have their children removed from them.

In the mid-19th century, many U.S. cities, such as New York City, saw a huge increase in immigration. Many of these immigrants were incredibly poor — they had escaped a hard, dangerous life somewhere else to try and find a better one in America. With this surge in immigration, many reformers, most notably Charles Loring Brace of the Children’s Aid Society, believed that the urban poor were unfit to raise children and that letting them do so would create cities full of crime and immorality.

Over roughly 70 active years, the society gathered up orphaned, abandoned, or simply impoverished children — often with parents still living who could not afford to feed them. On paper, the mission was supposed to be a benevolent rescue where they’d take urchins wandering the streets or children malnourished and dying. But in reality, a great many parents were forced to hand over their children without anything like what we’d call proper consent these days.

These children were placed on trains for the American Midwest, and what happened after could vary wildly. At best, a child would find themselves in a kind family, and grow up loved, healthy, and happy. At worst, they would end up in indentured labor. What happened most often, though, was that these children were part of a kind of social engineering project. The goal was to strip this immigrant generation of their cultural, urban, and religious heritage and assimilate them by placing them with rural, Protestant farming families.

So, perhaps Archard is right. Giving parents the incredible — and, at times, unreasonable — responsibility of raising their kids might be a bad system. But, if we look back at the history of philosophy and policy, perhaps it really is the best worst-case scenario we have going.