Should there be a parenting license.

Started by Tamhansen, February 05, 2012, 09:30:30 AM

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Tamhansen

I know that this question is purely hypothetical, as it would be impossible to enforce this concept. But do you think society as a whole would benefit from having a licensing system before people are allowed to have children. I mean if you want to adopt, most countries have a very strict list of demands you need to meet, before you are even considered. (Income, housing, stable social life, no criminal record) But every idiot who can find an idiot of the opposite sex, can have children. And as evidenced by many, many stories on the news, and the many more that don't get media attention, it would seem that quite a lot of people simply are unfit as parents.
ons and offs

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Lilias

I've always thought that the requirements for adoption are absurdly strict. If unwanted children in institutions are that much of an issue, then child services should make it easier for them to be placed than harder. No biological family is ever free from difficulties or tensions, monetary or otherwise, so why should an adoptive one be so?

On the other hand, I do believe that parents-to-be should get some kind of parenting education throughout the pregnancy, not just a couple of antenatal classes in order to cope with a newborn. Even perfectly good and capable people are first-time parents once, and there's a lot of pointers and resources that they could get from such orientation, about living as a family, rather than having to figure them out by themselves along the way.
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Trieste

I think it is one of those ideas that looks good on paper but would be horrible in practice. Who gets a license? Single moms, gays? At what income level? There are some dirt poor families that have turned out good kids. There are some rich families that, er, well. Two words: Paris Hilton.

The idea of screening for the compassion, patience, and humor (yes, humor) that you need for parenting is something that strikes me as so impossible le that I can't think of even a hypothetical way to do it.

Tamhansen

Very true. But i meant more in a way adoptive parents are screened. background checks, income, housing situations. And indeed perhaps a psychological screening.

Indeed screening the qualities a parent needs is difficult, but the ones put here, are quite measurable
ons and offs

They left their home of summer ease
Beneath the lowland's sheltering trees,
To seek, by ways unknown to all,
The promise of the waterfall.

Callie Del Noire

I know poor families that produced AWESOME kids. My Brothers' in-laws weren't well off (either of them) but both families raised a lot of children with a lot of smarts, wits and they all turned out successful. Income-wise, at least at one point or another, they would have been cited as 'unsuitable'.

It is a HARD criteria to build, and evaluate. I couldn't see how you could come up with a way to do it short of magic/psychic powers.

Beguile's Mistress

There really is no way to set a standard as each child is an individual as are the parental figures in their lives.

The best we can do as a community is to keep an eye on things and when we see clear and incontrovertible cases of abuse report them.

It does take a village or extended family in some cases to raise a child.

Shjade

The negative consequences would outweigh any benefits of such a system. Not only would there be issues on the bureaucratic side (because when aren't there problems in bureaucracy?) in developing reasonable qualifications for parents and in possibilities for exploitation of the subsequent laws politically, financially, etc., there would also be problems in terms of consequences for transgression.

What happens to those teenage kids that had unsafe sex and ended up with a pregnancy? What happens to their kid? Is the mother forced to get an abortion in an inversion of the Pro-Life mindset, or is it just automatically taken into the government's care, likely shuffled into a foster home? How is flooding the already inadequate foster system an improvement over unlicensed parenting?

Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I can't see it being anything good.
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Caelic

Absolutely not. 

First and foremost, from a practical standpoint it is wholly unenforceable.  In the United States at least, we've bogged down our court systems with quite a few unenforceable things (drug laws come to mind, but also driving restrictions on people who absolutely have to work, and have no other way to get there..)  and adding another is just another hardship on society that would accomplish.. what? 

Secondly, we don't actually know what it takes to be a good parent.  I'm sure you've seen all the books on the subject, and we've reams of psychological data.  But we couldn't actually give anyone a guide that says "Do this, and it will work."  Kids seem to come out alright in spite of parents, and turn bad despite best efforts. 

Third, having children is a natural part of being alive - I'd argue strongly for the point of it being an inherent right, and that taking it away is abhorrent.  Though I could see the argument in cases where a serious genetic defect would be passed down..

Trieste

Quote from: Caelic on February 05, 2012, 02:26:01 PM
Third, having children is a natural part of being alive - I'd argue strongly for the point of it being an inherent right, and that taking it away is abhorrent.  Though I could see the argument in cases where a serious genetic defect would be passed down..

I would say I disagree with this. I would hesitate to give anyone power to say definitively who can have children, but not everyone should have children. It is not an inalienable right, and is in fact inadvisable given that we have a population that we can feed (if we would stop incinerating perfectly good crops to keep prices high) but which we may not be able to provide clean water and housing to in the forseeable future. Even if you want to insist that it's someone's right to pass their genes along - which is arguable - there is still an argument that past the first child, every additional one is excessive and environmentally decadent.

I personally don't feel that people who can't take care of their kids should have them, and I think that extremists of any kind should be sterilized. ::) I would never legislate that, however. Not in a million years.

Envious

I don't want to raise my children based on someone elses perceived "good parenting know-how," so no, I don't believe there should be a parenting license.

Oniya

Because controlling people's pregnancies worked so well in ZPG and modern China.
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Callie Del Noire

Quote from: Oniya on February 05, 2012, 03:48:16 PM
Because controlling people's pregnancies worked so well in ZPG and modern China.

Yeah.. they did such a good job in China that within 2 decades there will be a gender disparity of 5 to 1 in some regions. Yeah..the next 20 years will be REAL fun in China.

vtboy

I think requiring all prospective parents to get a license is an excellent idea. If only my parents had been denied one. They had no business molding an impressionable, young mind.

I don't think formulation of standards for issuance of the license would be so terribly difficult. Just leave that part to me. I could provide a comprehensive list of prerequisites on a single piece of paper in five minutes.

Rather, I think the sticker problem is choosing penalties for those who break the law by conceiving without a license. Obviously, some form of sanction would be indispensable, otherwise the licensing requirement would be unenforceable. But, what should that sanction be? Compulsory abortion, either prenatal or postnatal? Removal of the child from its parents at birth? Castration, either chemical or physical? Prison? Hard labor? This last strikes me as somehow most appropriate, though it does seem somewhat unfair to choose a penalty which could only be imposed on mom and not on dad. 

Perhaps we should just sterilize everyone at birth and turn the whole human reproduction thing over to the state a la "Brave New World."

I breathlessly look forward to my next soma-holiday.

Shjade

Quote from: vtboy on February 05, 2012, 04:23:36 PM
Hard labor? This last strikes me as somehow most appropriate, though it does seem somewhat unfair to choose a penalty which could only be imposed on mom and not on dad.
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Caeli

Quote from: Callie Del Noire on February 05, 2012, 03:52:35 PM
Yeah.. they did such a good job in China that within 2 decades there will be a gender disparity of 5 to 1 in some regions. Yeah..the next 20 years will be REAL fun in China.

At least part of the magnitude of the gender disparity can be attributed to traditional cultural beliefs about sons and their first wife being the only legitimate members of the family who can carry on and hold rites and rituals that ensure the well-being of their parents and ancestors into the afterlife.

I would not necessarily say that laws controlling pregnancy/parenting would be a good thing, but I don't believe that such a law would result in similar consequences in Western cultures that do not have that powerful cultural attitude regarding the children's gender.
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Oniya

Gender disparity aside, there's been some rumblings that people have been able to buy their way around the regulations.
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Caeli

I'm sure that there are. I haven't done extensive research into the subject, as it wasn't my time period of area of interest, but I'm sure that it happens, and that there are other ways to get around it.
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Trieste

Quote from: Oniya on February 05, 2012, 05:33:55 PM
Gender disparity aside, there's been some rumblings that people have been able to buy their way around the regulations.

The way that China's regulations were explained to me was that it's not a punitive system but an incentive system. If you only have one child, they subsidize the hell out of it. If you have two+ children, that money goes away. So the wealthy would be able to afford more children by dint of that.

This is my rudimentary understanding, though, so please take with salt. :P

Callie Del Noire

Quote from: Oniya on February 05, 2012, 05:33:55 PM
Gender disparity aside, there's been some rumblings that people have been able to buy their way around the regulations.

Have been that way for a LONG time. Party members of a certain rank or men of 'influence' were able to get around it.

Caela

While the idea of a parenting license sounds interesting in theory, unless you were willing to back it up by forcing the entire population onto some reliable form of birth control, there'd be no way to enforce it.

Serephino

There are definitely people who shouldn't be parents; my neighbor being one of them.  It scares me even more that she's trying to get pregnant again, either to trap the man, or get more in welfare.  We're not really sure.  We just know that right now she's on a government program for single mothers where the state pays all her bills.  At least once a week she screams at those poor kids to pack their shit and get out of her house because she doesn't want them, but she won't let their father have them.  She should be sterilized...

Of course, that's going on how she treats the kids she already has.  I mean, my god, who has their kids walk in on them during sex and wants to keep going and just let them watch?  I need mind bleach and serious wall sound proofing. 

CmdrRenegade

Interestingly, that's what marriage originally was: a license to have children.  This is the primary reason for the whole 'marriage is between a woman and a man' thing.  The whole thing about 'two people loving each other' was a relatively recent development in human history around the time of the Renaissance.  Christianity simply embraced it because it still meant people would get busy having babies.  The opposite side of this was that an out of wedlock birth usually meant the shaming and shunning of both the mother and child, including disallowing the child to be baptized (a really big deal back then), as its birth wasn't blessed by God.  If the father wanted to be a cad, he absolutely could and did not have to support his mistress and resulting children. 

Any kind of regulation (that doesn't involve invasive and morally problematic medicine) is probably going to look like the above.  I don't like the current welfare system, but the old way seems even worse. 
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adeleturner

Yeah, sorry, but that sort of licensing would be getting into "justifiable violent overthrow of the government" territory.  How can someone question the individual right of parenthood and yet not question the "right" of the government to restrict parenthood?  Plus, we are getting into serious pre-crime territory here.

Hemingway

Control over sex and reproduction seems to me to be not a requirement for, but an unmistakeable sign of a totalitarian regime. Telling someone what drugs they can and cannot put in their own bodies seems bad enough to me; telling people what they can do with their bodies, with those they love, is several orders of magnitude worse. I think the notion could be dismissed on those grounds alone. Even if that were the only problem, that would still, in my eyes, be enough.

But, of course, that's far from the only problem. There's also problems like how you'd enforce it, who would be allowed and who wouldn't, how to sustain a population in the long term when many countries already have fertility rates lower than what's needed.

Besides, it's all based on the notion that certain upbringings will produce "bad" people, and others produce "good". I have no doubt that a child raised by a poor, uneducated single parent in a dangerous neighborhood will be more likely to end up being in some way "undersireable" to society, and vice versa, but there are no guarantees either way. You're not dealing with natural science where you can generalize and create tidy, organized theories.

And we've managed fine so far, with no indication that things are getting any worse. While it's of course possibly to point to specific examples, that can't be the basis for laws of that magnitude.

Caelic

Quote from: Trieste on February 05, 2012, 02:44:16 PM
I would say I disagree with this. I would hesitate to give anyone power to say definitively who can have children, but not everyone should have children. It is not an inalienable right, and is in fact inadvisable given that we have a population that we can feed (if we would stop incinerating perfectly good crops to keep prices high) but which we may not be able to provide clean water and housing to in the forseeable future. Even if you want to insist that it's someone's right to pass their genes along - which is arguable - there is still an argument that past the first child, every additional one is excessive and environmentally decadent.

I personally don't feel that people who can't take care of their kids should have them, and I think that extremists of any kind should be sterilized. ::) I would never legislate that, however. Not in a million years.

I say it is an inalienable right, even more so than anything else we consider.  First, it would take massive government effort to acheive this, and *everyone* would fight it tooth and nail, as everyone feels they have a right to a child, or at least as much right as anyone else.  It is both an actual, intended biological function of the body, something your body is meant to do without medical interference, and in the best cases it is a literal, physical representation of the love between two people.  Its even worse if you take the religious view - you really, really are supposed to be able to have kids, according to quite a few religions. 

The fact that everyone would fight it says to me that on some very deep level, we think it is part of being human - which, it is, of course.  One of the qualities a living organism has to have to be clearly considered "Alive" is the capability to reproduce. 

It might be *pragmatic* for us to keep undesirables from having children, for a variety of reasons, and I can't argue that point.  However, we certainly couldn't keep people from having kids and then tell them they had no *right* to have kids - they couldn't possibly have a right to anything more strongly than that.  It is certainly a stronger right than the right of ownership of property we have enshrined in law, or the right to be "Secure against unreasonable searches" or to "Bear arms".. or even a right of "Freedom of the press"

I won't go into the lengthy treatise on our environment vs. population issues not being as bad as the popular perception suggests in this thread, but suffice to say the U.S. is getting fatter and fatter, Japan and canada are following, as well as europe.. the US exports food.. etc.  We develop new things to improve food production all the time.  I'm certain one day overpopulation will be a serious problem, but we aren't near it.

Trieste

Erm...

The point of my post is over here ---------------> .

X <--------------------------------- You are here.

You can say it is an inalienable right all you would like, but I disagree with you strongly. That's okay, it may just be a fundamental disagreement. If your goal is to justify your stance, however, that has not been accomplished.

Using "people would fight tooth and nail" as a justification is not strong supporting evidence. There were people who fought against desegregation in this country, violently so. There are people who violently oppose the openly gay and transgender. Violent opposition alone does not a justification make.

Scientists are still unsure of precisely how to define life, or species, or several other basic scientific words that one would think would be easy to define. The ability to reproduce is still considered part of it, last I knew, but the use of that ability - especially to the detriment of the larger species - is not included. The further lack of classifying men with vasectomies as no-longer-alive also suggests that the ability to reproduce is not, in fact, fundamentally necessary to be alive.

And I believe I addressed that food is not the issue. In fact, I'm fairly certain I said very clearly that food is not the issue.

adeleturner

Quote from: Trieste on February 11, 2012, 04:07:05 AMYou can say it is an inalienable right all you would like, but I disagree with you strongly. That's okay, it may just be a fundamental disagreement. If your goal is to justify your stance, however, that has not been accomplished.
It seems to not only be a fundamental disagreement, but even the issue of who is responsible for "justification" is a fundamental disagreement.

Either you believe that the State should be persumed to have authority to regulate certain personal decisions unless individuals provide justification for self-determination, or you believe that individuals have the authority to regulate their own personal decisions unless the State can provide justification for restricting it.

I'm personally big into the idea of self-ownership.  If the State or any other authority wants to regulate the actions of individuals, they are the ones who have to justify their actions.  I occasionally fool myself into believing that the alternative theory died during the Enlightenment.

Trieste

Quote from: adeleturner on February 11, 2012, 01:25:13 PM
Either you believe that the State should be persumed to have authority to regulate certain personal decisions unless individuals provide justification for self-determination, or you believe that individuals have the authority to regulate their own personal decisions unless the State can provide justification for restricting it.

Was addressed in an earlier post. :)

Quote from: Trieste on February 05, 2012, 02:44:16 PM
I would say I disagree with this. I would hesitate to give anyone power to say definitively who can have children, but not everyone should have children. It is not an inalienable right, and is in fact inadvisable given that we have a population that we can feed (if we would stop incinerating perfectly good crops to keep prices high) but which we may not be able to provide clean water and housing to in the forseeable future. Even if you want to insist that it's someone's right to pass their genes along - which is arguable - there is still an argument that past the first child, every additional one is excessive and environmentally decadent.

I personally don't feel that people who can't take care of their kids should have them, and I think that extremists of any kind should be sterilized. ::) I would never legislate that, however. Not in a million years.

RubySlippers

Quote from: adeleturner on February 11, 2012, 01:25:13 PM
It seems to not only be a fundamental disagreement, but even the issue of who is responsible for "justification" is a fundamental disagreement.

Either you believe that the State should be persumed to have authority to regulate certain personal decisions unless individuals provide justification for self-determination, or you believe that individuals have the authority to regulate their own personal decisions unless the State can provide justification for restricting it.

I'm personally big into the idea of self-ownership.  If the State or any other authority wants to regulate the actions of individuals, they are the ones who have to justify their actions.  I occasionally fool myself into believing that the alternative theory died during the Enlightenment.


Then does that extend to young people I for one saw a good reason for K-8 formal education looking back but when I hit High School age opted out and my parents and school didn't get it but I did point out - how the hell are they going to make me do the work if I don't care to? I did go to class, sat in back quietly reading or doing some other things I wanted to do, refused to take any tests or do homework and this was in 9th grade. In the end I was let free to educate myself. I find it ironic on the one hand people want rights for parents and the educators and then when it comes to the oppressed teenager its not okay to let them be free to choose.

Not that I would say not offer options I would lower the working age to 14 for full-time work, offer more options for self-education and do things along those lines but if the student wants to go to school for a class or something that is fine. Treat High School like college more if one went just to take a class in something or get a certification. But I've always been one to go against the grain and ask why to much or see potential for doing things in a new way.

The only issue with the license idea it takes the power from parents to the state, but I would ask by what right the state has as the government to control me once I'm older and out of eighth grade. The only reason that is the cut off is K-8 is where someone gets exposure to lots of things and learns the basics of being a citizen its the classic view that is general preparation.

Iniquitous

Wait...

Ruby you are saying that a 14 yr old child should be allowed to make decisions concerning his/her life instead of the parents? Do you HAVE children? There is NO way a 14 yr old child understands the world enough to make a decision that will better his/her life. The vast majority would make an asinine decision that would negatively affect them  for the rest of their life. I know at 14 I certainly did not have a clue (despite my thinking I knew it all) and neither of my children could have made a well informed decision that would BETTER them for the rest of their lives at 14. Hell my son just turned 18 and I still worry over the decisions he makes.

As for lowering the full time working age to 14 - uhh. No. A child needs to be allowed to be a child, to learn, to grow before being thrust into the world of an adult. At 14 they are not mentally, emotionally or even physically ready to be turned into adults.


Now then. OT: While it sickens me to see the things happening to children by people who obviously should have never had children, trying to police such a thing as reproduction would be impossible. Not too mention, I protest the government being in my uterus already - I sure as hell would not agree to something like this.
Bow to the Queen; I'm the Alpha, the Omega, everything in between.


RubySlippers

Yes but if the mentors and parents are doing their jobs and being supportive most would seek out advice when needed, but I see High School as largely a waste of time as it is now.

Oniya

Most?  Are you serious?

The place where they would 'seek out advice' in 90% of the circumstances would be their peer group and the Internet - both of which are incredibly well-known for their lack of accuracy.
"Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women.~*~*~Don't think it's all been done before
And in that endeavor, laziness will not do." ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think we're never gonna win this war
Robin Williams-Dead Poets Society ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think your world's gonna fall apart
I do have a cause, though.  It's obscenity.  I'm for it.  - Tom Lehrer~*~All you need is your beautiful heart
O/O's Updated 5/11/21 - A/A's - Current Status! - Writing a novel - all draws for Fool of Fire up!
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Iniquitous

#32
+1 to Oniya's reply. I can certainly say for myself that when I needed advice, it was not my parents I turned to despite the fact that both of them constantly told me I could talk to them and come to them about anything. I also know for a fact that my kids talk to their friends about 99% of their issues and only come to me when they have nowhere else to turn or have already screwed up - and I have a very firm rule of talking to my children about everything on a damn near daily basis.

Not all children are the same, some actually do turn to their parents. But I can tell you true that by the time a child hits the age of 11 or so (younger in some, older in others) parents become 'the enemy'. Parents are embarrassing, parents are stupid, parents just want to ruin your life. And it isnt till they are in they are older that they realize their parents actually knew what they were talking about. I was 31 when I looked at my mom and told her the older I get the smarter she gets because it was then that it dawned on me that everything my mother had told me when I was a teenager was true.

You want 14 yrs old to be able to make adult decisions? You are going to end up with more cases of children having children and MORE cases where people start thinking the government should decide who has kids and who doesn't. This isn't the 1300's where schooling was obsolete and the only thing children had to learn was how to plow the field, herd the animals or whatever trade their parents did.
Bow to the Queen; I'm the Alpha, the Omega, everything in between.


Caelic

Quote from: Trieste on February 11, 2012, 04:07:05 AM
(clip)
You can say it is an inalienable right all you would like, but I disagree with you strongly. That's okay, it may just be a fundamental disagreement. If your goal is to justify your stance, however, that has not been accomplished.
(clip)

And I believe I addressed that food is not the issue. In fact, I'm fairly certain I said very clearly that food is not the issue.

Well, would anything at all constitute an inalienable right, in your view?  Keep in mind you are either supporting mandatory abortions without government approval with this stance, or mandatory removal of children from parents. 

Oniya

I believe that was covered by Messrs. Jefferson, Hobbes, Locke, Paine, et al.
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Trieste

I'm supporting neither; just because I don't think something should be done doesn't mean that I think the government should legislate it. *shrug* And this thread isn't about what I think are inalienable rights. It's about whether people have a right to give birth as they choose. I do not believe that is an inalienable right, for the reasons stated above.

OldSchoolGamer

Sorry, but the U.S. government already has fubared family law in this country beyond recognition.  For example, divorced fathers get such a raw deal I'm surprised they haven't joined the Occupy movements en masse with Molotov cocktails in one hand and Kalishnikovs in the other.  Yes, it's that bad.  I knew a guy a couple jobs back who had his driver's license taken away because he couldn't pay $600 a month in child support to his crackhead of an ex-wife.  He's ex-Special Forces too, so if he ever goes off the deep end and decides to settle accounts with the State, I'll just grab a bag of popcorn because it'll be quite the scene.

Trust me when I say that making parents get a license from the U.S. government or state government would turn into a first-class clusterfuck, and that right quickly.  I'm not saying that to be a jerk or to impugn the motives of the OP and Co. who have the idea--as with Marxism, decent-minded people can come up with some pretty serviceable arguments why licensing parents is a good idea.  We've all seen enough jag-offs mis-raising their kids to think "there oughta be a law" at one point or another--likely several points.  It's an understandable sentiment, especially when you've been jabbed in the knee for the third time by some spoiled brat in the supermarket check-out lane whose parent is obliviously jabbering away on a cell phone.

However, good sentiments often make bad policy, and this is one such time.

For starters, this idea would require a huge, new, invasive bureaucracy to enforce.  Think the DMV is bad?  The Bureau of Reproductive Licensing would be an order of magnitude worse.  Funding?  We're already living in an era when over 1 out of every 4 dollars the federal government spends is borrowed, and state governments are slashing everything from highway maintenance to schools to welfare to balance their budgets.  Where would the money for this come from?  Charging fees for a parenting license?  That would open up an epic can of worms.  Believe me when I say you don't want to go there. 

Second, we live in a country where a significant percentage of the population actually believes government-assisted health care is some communist conspiracy to destroy America.  I can guarantee you a parental licensing scheme would bring the tinfoil-hatters, militias, white racial chauvinists and fundies out in force.  To quote a movie title, "There Will Be Blood."  A couple posts back, someone said that this is irrelevant to whether or not parental licenses are a good idea, but I disagree emphatically.  When a policy would be so hated by such a significant percentage of the population that we would see regular, ongoing incidents of social violence from arson to assassinations to truck bombs from sea to shining sea, that has to be involved in the decision-making calculus for the Powers That Be.  That reality cannot be ignored.  Telling naysayers "let them eat cake" doesn't turn out very well.  We're seeing this right now in Greece, where bankers and government planners are in ivory towers doing what looks great on paper while hungry mobs gather and their country teeters on the edge of collapse.

Third, we would see corruption on a scale unheard of since Prohibition and Tammany Hall, if not longer.  People would beg, bribe, and fake their way around this.  I'd be shocked if a cottage industry worth billions, even tens of billions, didn't arise in a few short years, catering to would-be parents who wanted to expunge or remove whatever it was in their records preventing them from getting a license.  The rich would buy their way past this.  As for the rest...

Fourth, quite a few people would simply drop off the grid entirely to get around this.  We'd see poor kids (because, after all, it would be the poor who would bear the brunt of this, I don't care what anyone says, that's how it would turn out in the real world), raised in secret in the backwoods and wilderness across the land.  Hundreds of thousands of kids with no access to health care, education, or other social services.  Look at the experience of undocumented aliens in America today for an idea...only more would be in this new underclass of "undesirables."

This is definitely not a road I want to see America travel down.

Chris Brady

Personally, given the amount of outright fucked up kids out there, I honestly think psychological testing to be a parent is nearly mandatory nowadays.

HOWEVER, the most we should do to prospective parents is to tell them honestly that A) Parenting is not going to be easy.  B) it's not always going to be fun.  And C) assuming they do go with the psych testing, and they fail, we should just tell them, "Hey, if you want to have kids, that's fine, but there's a good chance they'll be class A screwjobs."

Because, really, every kid is going to be different, not every parenting situation can be covered/explained/expected, but a few things do crop up time and again.

To be a good parent you must have a sense of humour, mental endurance, a willingness to compromise and, most importantly, a willingness to communicate.  That's both time to sit down and listen, as well as to explain to your little people.  It's not always going to be fun, but if you can tough it out, it can be among the most rewarding experiences of your life.  Or so my parents say, and you know what?  I think they may be on to something.
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