Parent/Child Record Relationship

There was a similar post last week about customizing how records are deleted.  My solution was to indicate records should be deleted and have someone else do the deletion as a double-check.  Mark Shnier suggested "marking" a record for deletion and then using an automation to actually perform the deletion - within which you can build rules etc.  So, for example a user would click a button to "delete" the record; but it would only delete via the automation if there were no children.  Also, you could have a second-automation that if the "delete" marker was populated and there were children; it would "undo" the marker field (checkbox, date field etc.)