As you're watching the news you hear some dismal statistics from the US Department of Health and Human Services

Nearly 750,000 children annually suffer from some form of maltreatment — neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, or psychological abuse. If you were given the opportunity to make some grand changes in the American society to reduce the likelihood of child abuse, what changes would you make?
What will be an ideal response?

A good answer will be similar to the following:
Eradicating child maltreatment would entail a massive effort. First, you would need to change American attitudes about physical punishment. As long as physical punishment is considered acceptable, abuse will occur. Physical punishment also seems to occur in poverty-stricken families living in chronic stress of trying to provide food and shelter. We would need to provide aid to these families to reduce their stress which would reduce physical punishment, abuse, and neglect. In addition to changing these more global issues, counseling and training would need to be provided for parents so that they are aware of effective methods of parenting and discipline.
On a less idealistic level, the following could be (and are being) done to reduce maltreatment and the negative effects of maltreatment:
- Providing parents with social support (where to get advice and reassurance)
- Providing education (benefits of authoritative parenting and effective ways to use feedback, modeling; setting reasonable expectations)