Can We Invest in a Child Without Turning Childhood Into an Asset?

Early help can change a life. A prediction can also become a sentence. The moral difficulty begins when the spreadsheet cannot tell the difference. In the novel, a fictional programme that treats childhood as infrastructure arrives with prevention, public health and reassuring professional language. Then children become yield, parenting becomes a qualification and family history becomes a risk score. This article asks how society can invest seriously in children while protecting their present lives and resisting coercive prediction.