“May I See Your License and Registration to Parent?”
To drive a car, we need to obtain a license after proper training and preparation. To fly a plane, pilots need countless hours of practice, testing, and classes. To become a doctor, people typically need to complete many years of school and testing to achieve their status. Imagine a world of inexperienced drivers, untrained pilots, and uneducated doctors. The roads would be a mess, littered with multi-car pile ups and crashed planes. The population would exponentially decrease with these disasters and the addition of unsolved, grave diseases spreading like wildfire. Now, consider the value of a life. Babies being born into this tyrannical, theoretical world would be a tragedy, undisputedly. How come we allow this to happen now, unregulatedly? These requirements are to ensure safety, skill, and proficiency in potentially dangerous tasks or activities. Our current world is surprisingly not far from the one described, and without training and licensing parents before having a baby, we are gaining closer and faster to the extreme than we think. It is imperative that projected parents begin being required to obtain a license after demonstrating proper training to ensure the wellbeing and optimal life of their children and the future society primarily in America.
It is utterly appalling that a privilege — not right — such as driving requires a certain skill set to be tested, yet parenting of a new human being is open to anyone, under any circumstances, and completely unregulated. While reproduction is a natural process, those voluntarily involved should have responsibility of consideration and planning before they decide to embark on the reproduction process. Not to mention age limits, as there are for virtually everything else from working a summer job to fighting in wars. The concept of finding it necessary to license parents has been relevant for decades, and the arguments continue to strengthen with time.
In 1980, Hugh Lafollette published a book titled “Philosophy and Public Affairs”. In it, an essay called “Licensing Parents” addresses the topic with five contentions supporting the implementation of parent licensing. The first one is that we currently license activities that could involve harm to others such as driving, medicine, and law, to name a few. This was already previously addressed, although the point cannot be stressed enough that bringing a life into the world is quite possibly the most important act, though treated as the least, with lack of regulation through proper licensure.
Another point Lafollette made is that children are valuable and should be protected, as they cannot protect themselves. This is vital to consider, as there have been many cases demonstrating the way certain children have been treated by unfit parents and unable to protect themselves from danger or improper conditions. As egregious as can be imagined of parents neglecting or depriving their children of basic needs and stability, unfortunately these child abuse cases are common and will continue to be until measures are taken to prevent it.
An Indiana couple locked their four children in a basement for hours at a time without food, water or a bathroom, forcing them to urinate in a bottle or bucket, police said. Though this example may seem extreme, it is not far from the thousands of others where willing, yet untrained parents have been able to freely have and raise children at their own arbitrary discretion that result in consequences and compromised lives of children. Is this a world in which you’d like to continue living?
There are solutions to protecting the innocent kids who will be born into the world. I agree in that the licensure of parents will not prevent reproduction. It just won’t. People in America live off of the basis of freedom and rights. These won’t be taken away. But like in any licensure program, the licensing of future parents will inevitably encourage a greater level of competent and educated parents. This of course won’t save ALL the children, but its implementation surely will save a few kids along the way, which is more than can be asked for. The testing and licensing requirements are yet to be determined, but this movement gaining momentum should give a start to change.
It’s incredibly easy to feel offended reading this, as a parent-to-be or even just as a person who enjoys liberty. Despite these initial feelings, if you personally are invested in the wellbeing of your future children, it would only make sense that you would like to be the best parent for them as possible. Licensing parents will not necessarily pick the “best” to be parents, but at least weed out most of the worst, which should overarchingly benefit the next and consequent generations in quality. While keeping in mind this idea of a better future of well-trained parents, it is also important in the iminent short-term of safety and lifestyle of the child from birth until they go off on their own.
Support, love, and guarantee of a safe environment is something that all children are entitled to. Having these children, however, is NOT something that you are entitled to. It is an immense responsibility and undertaking to have children, and unfit parents should not have the ability to negatively and knowingly affect a newborn’s life. With parent licensing, we can change the world one baby at a time, for the better.
