Oh good, now we have two problems... parents in prison and a kid without parents.

I’m genuinely shocked at the idea that anyone thinks more prison will solve issues like this.

When someone wishes to use prison they are just voicing their frustration at perceived injustice. Same reason some people want to send bankers to prison despite no court having proved their guilt.

The real challenge is that the tools available to is, as a society, to punish perceived injustice are very few. We have fines, prison, and social stigma. You won’t get far with fines for a person already on social assistance. Social stigma is a non-starter in our climate; she’s a single mother trying so hard for her kids! This either leaves prison (as bad of an idea as that is) or admitting that we have not criminalized bad parenting and some people will absolutely RUIN their kids’ lives.

Just giving you context because it’s easy to roll your eyes at someone (“that dummy wants to send her to prison lol”) when I believe there is a deeper explanation.

That’s a fair and nuanced argument. I will caution though that “they should be in prison” goes from a frustrated response to actual policy quite quickly for some demographics.

Well I do agree that it was somewhat simplistic comment from my side. In reality,I'm not even sure what would work best: a school dropout not encouraging their kids to read or learn in general is catch 22 situation, because they won't know how the life would have been for them should they continued to attend the school. If you fail to see all the opportunities that could have opened because of education, it can be hard to tell your kids to do it. So in such situation, either the parents pull their shit together and do what they need to do, as responsible parents,or the state intervenes to help them,or if the help doesn't work, punish somehow.

It’s a tricky problem, for certain.

In some ways, we do have a punishment system for parents with truant children, but it’s very hard to thread a line that’s actually good for the children. You want to scare the parents with punishment if they don’t have any intrinsic (or social) interest in educating their children, but actually jailing parents won’t help most kids one bit.

It doesn't need to be just prison.Fines would do the job to some degree as well. It was ok to slap kids 20-30 years ago,while now it's pretty much illegal to do so.Is there no slapping anymore?No, some kids still get it, unfortunately,but there's definitely less of it across the board. Failure to provide your own kids a safe, and at least in some way, motivated path to education is failing them for life. It is absolutely devastating to see generation after generation growing like this.'Me need no book bruv' is an absolute norm in certain communities.

Maybe instead of slapping the kids we should be slapping the parents.

(Unfortunately this idea wouldn't work, since many of the slapped parents would doubtlessly slap their kids in retaliation.)

This problem mostly impacts the poor. You're going to fine them? That isn't going to solve the problem either and will probably create even more problems.