Should We Need A License To Be A Parent? - Comments

great article! I think there should be a license, I mean I know kids who are neglected all the time by their parents, heck, I'm one of 'em.

I couldn't finish it. It's very well written and you have a lot of information.

But I think we do need a license. China's population is so over that you can only have one child per family and if you have a second you are fined. Most Chinese parents want boys and will set their infant daughters in a box in a park or an orphanage.
In India they use advertisement such as a bill board of a happy person and she's having fun doing whatever and next to her will be a frustrated person carrying a baby in a bad environment.
It is expected that the Earths population will reach 9 Billion in 2050. As of May 31, 2009, the Earth's population is estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be 6,783,421,727.

* just over 1,500 children die each year in the United States from child abuse and neglect
* 905,000 children were the victims of child abuse in 2006
* 70 percent of child abuse victims are under age three years old
* over 80 percent of the abused children were abused by one the child's parent
* neglect is the most common form of child abuse, followed by physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, and lastly, medical neglect

Not everyone is cut out to be a parent. Personally I think chicks should keep their legs closed, but a license could help people out and might control the population.

Do I need a license to have a child? Yes. It's called a girl's period, and I got mine a while ago, thanks.

Do we need a license to be a good parent? Well. That's absolutely ridiculous. Being a good parent and a good person can't be learned in a classroom and can't be proven by a piece of plastic. You can't grade how good of a parent someone will be in a year, two years, twenty years. The human mind isn't something that can be predicted. This is a good theory in general, but it will never work.

Puberty is pretty much the universal license to become a parent.

This is kinda ridiculous. It's setting itself up for failure. It would just be another law that we'd have to pay more taxes for to support, and just more ways that a person could get in trouble. It sounds good, but it would never work in a million years.

Great article.

Parenting licences seem like a great thing on paper, but it would just be chaotic if it were real. For all the reasons you talked about.

Good article. I agree with the parenting license, but it seems like a fat chance, I'm sorry to say. (At least in America.)

No offence, love but it would never happen.
Not in America at any rate.

You've heard of China's one child policy, I'm sure? How do you think they police it?
It's with an idea such as this - that couples have to apply to have a child, and that application has to be approved (thus limiting when and if they could have a child as a license would). It's because this policy has been previously adopted by a Communist nation that it would never be employed in America. The utter anti-Communist tendencies that have coloured that Capitalist nation's poitics throughout the 20th century (and indeed, most Western countries, though to nowhere near the same extent) has at points ran almost to persecution. If Barack Obama were to employ such policies now, it could be interpreted as supporting a Communist country, thereby assisting the spread of Communism that the West has always been so terrified of and undermining America's basic beliefs.

Don't you love world politics?

as everyone has said, yes, that was very long and very well written and argued.
however, i totally disagree with a license for having children, or forced abortions and sterilization.
that's ridiculous.
just because people screw around and get themselves pregnant when they're young doesn't mean they don't grow up eventually, and become responsible enough.
insanity.

Well, there's no chance my mother would have got a license. She was smoking and drinking herself to death.

And you know, when she got pregnant with me, she stopped it all and spent eighteen years teaching me to value myself. She never refused a question, she tracked down my birth father on my request even though she can't stand him...

She was a fantastic mother, just like some other women who would never pass hypothetical tests to be awarded hypothetical licenses might be.

Wow, that was long. It was very well-written. I agree with your standpoint.

I suddenly want to write a story about a world with parenting licenses…

Sure, there are hundreds of people with children that shouldn't, including one of my sisters. A liscence is to eccentric for the age old problem. I'd go for a parenting class, not segment in Health, but full blown class instead of a liscence. Plus, unless you have perfect birth control so that once taken one could no longer ever have children in thier lives, there will be no way to enforce whether or not someone gets pregnant. What happens if you do get pregnant ilegally? What happens if some one fails the test and they work hard to take it again? Would that be allowed or no because suddenly people can't change? There's just too many variables to the equation to factor, and a liscence isn't the solution.

Very well written though.

Er. How would that work? You illegal got pregnant, go to prison? Have an abortion?
Uh. No. A license wouldn't stop someone from procreating, and would go against civil rights, plus it has more bad than good.
Well written article, obscenely long *meep* but very well written.

It's ridiculous.

I don't think the license would work. It's just cause children to be hidden away and become ill, and you can't stop people from having children by having a license.
I think there'd be alot of illegal children in the world if there was.

good article (but really long), especially since it looked at both arguments

to be honest, there are times when I think a "parenting license" would be a good idea, but there are much better things to do than go to the extreme of forced sterilisation an all that. I agree with GreyWings with the idea of registering pregnancies but that still has the problem of what happens if the home is unsuitable and cannot be changed. Should the social worker then take the child or leave it there? also what would the standards be?
I think the best thing would be more education, not sex ed as such but, for example, using those dolls that are programmed to cry, require feeding, changes and all the other jobs assosicated with babies, to give people a taste of parenthood not being all fun and games.

Oh wow, this article was extremely well written. I find the idea of making a license to have children completely disgusting, it takes away our natural rights. If this ever passes, I think I'll loose what little faith in humanity I have left. Making someone sterile because they had two 'illegal' kids? That's sick and forced abortions....God it's hard to even imagine how people would stand this.

I don't think anyone can judge who will be a good parent. I'm sure a lot of people looked down on my mum for becoming pregnant with me while sh was still in school, but I've never been abused, I've never gone hungry, I've never been neglected. And I wouldn't have been the easiest child to deal with when I was younger as social anxiety caused me to refuse to go to school. But she never found it too much to handle and I've turned out just fine. She's gone on to have 5 other children who have also turned out fine.
Should we have been aborted because my mum was too young?

I entirely disagree.

Yes, some kids are brought up in poor environments but better social housing and more adequate help and education into the caring of children is a far better and more logical step than licences.

Conisidering you are proposing forced abortions and sterilizations for those who cannot seem rather elitist to me. Are you trying to get rid of the 'poor' people by breeding them out?

A bit Mao for me.

Gosh, I think that's the longest article I've ever read the whole of on Mibba! Well done, very riveting.

Personally, I don't think you should need a license to parent. But I think a rule saying something along the lines of; anyone who becomes pregnant should register it, and then a social worker checks out their house/ where they're going to bring up the child, would be a good idea. That way, parents with problems could be identified before the child was born, and receive counselling, help or advice on getting up to a good standard. This would hopefully eradicate kids being in poorly cleaned homes, too cramped houses etc.

Heh. Sometimes I wonder, if licenses should be needed to have a child. Goodness knows some people in this world should never, ever procreate...