This week the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) released their report Benefit Sanctions: Creating an Invisible Underclass of Children, which focussed on the sanctions on beneficiaries who failed to meet certain obligations.

The report was critical of the National Party’s ‘ideologically driven’ policy of forcing parents into paid employment (among other social obligations). The report argued that the expectation of employment overshadowed the necessity of being a good parent.

Does this imply that parents who voluntarily choose to return to work after their child is born are by default bad parents?

Somewhat perplexingly, the report failed to include what would have been the most explosive piece of evidence for their assertion: that benefit sanctions truly have created an ‘invisible underclass of children’.

Although some families have experienced financial penalties, the report failed to provide proof that children were negatively affected.

Instead, the main criticism of the sanction on benefits is that the policy has unintended consequences that harm children. When parents fail to meet the conditions of their benefit, such as being available for paid work, it is the children who suffer from this economic insecurity.

Confusingly, CPAG appears to be advocating that children be given separate securities and entitlements from their parents, yet criticise instances where parents do not have complete freedom over their parenting decisions.

CPAG simultaneously demand the state protect these children, while dismissing the claim that the state knows better than parents on what is best for children. The government is generally expected to intervene when things go wrong, but is also criticised when policies have unintended consequences.

And yet, can the government afford not to be involved? Due to democratic imperatives, the government must aim to spend money wisely. Often, this will entail imposing certain obligations on welfare recipients to discourage long-term dependency on the taxpayers’ limited means.

This is where the so-called safety net becomes a sticky web. The government is not likely to relent on imposing conditions when it has a financial investment in the outcomes of both parent and child. However, obligations will often involve unintended consequences, or sub-optimal policies, especially in parenting where there is no definitive answer on what the ideal should be.

Trawling through the shelves of any bookstore, it becomes obvious that there is no conclusive theory on how to raise children well. For every piece of advice out there, there is a counter-theory. No matter what you do, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Parenting is complicated. But so is designing policy free from unintended consequences. The first step to escaping this sticky web is to reimagine the welfare state not as protection from vulnerability, but as the safety net it was originally intended to be.