I certainly wish there was some way to license people to be parents, but there just isn't a viable way to legislate this. In the end, it'll likely be worse for kids than better.
Don't you think teachers are being asked to do too much these days. There's only so much about the world teachers can educate on and the rest should be the parents or I suppose the relevant religious figurehead. Parents should parent, teachers teach. At the end of the day, it's not a teachers job to raise someone else's children.
I'd have to agree with this. Part of the problem today is people not taking responsibility for their actions and then trying to pass that responsibility on to someone else. And then of course they blame that someone else when something goes wrong. Could there be more in the relative Health/Human Growth classes and such, sure, but I can't imagine many kids would take it seriously.
I mean, first of all, you gotta take into account that most pregnancies are pretty much accidents. Very few people sit down and say, lets have kids. It's mostly, an oops situation. ......
I had to respond to this...you'd be surprised how many people actually do sit down and say "Ok, let's try and have kids." Me and my wife actually did just that. IF we had gotten pregnant prior to that then oh well, but we wanted to wait till we both had our lives in order first...if possible.
Then, and this is most important, there really is no test that can determine who will be a good parent. No matter what, it is a crap shoot. You can have the money, the mental stability, the family values, and your kid will still grow up to perform sex acts in alley ways for crack money. Flip it around, and that son of a crack ****e could grow up to be a well adjusted person. You just don't know man.
I think this is probably the most important thing to keep in mind. Who exactly is going to determine what makes a good parent and what doesn't? Who is going to be able to tell what a child is going to grow up to be? There's no way to do this. You have kids that grow up to be great, kind, humble, amazing people that have come from horrible a homelife. And the opposite of course. You have kids that have grown up to be great people that came from near poverty stricken status. And some real horrible people that have come from well-to-do families. You simply cannot determine any of this by the parents.
You can't simply remove sex from the equation. People are going to have sex. It's something that has to be addressed if you're planning on legislating this. Specifically, how do you deal with those that get pregnant without a "license" or in spite of being rejected by the system to have children? Are the pregnancies aborted? Are the children ripped from their parent's arms and thrown into the foster care system? As system which is already flawed and overflowing? I don't think either of those are going to sit well with many people, even if it's got the underlying intention of "for the children."
Kids also have a way of changing people. People that you wouldn't normally think would be good parents, or that you would never see as a parent, can become the best parents once they actually hold that child in their hands for the first time.
I'm not naive - I don't expect such a decision to be left to one person or even a few. The conditions should be agreed upon by experts in the appropriate fields and screened by ethics committees, at the very least.
I think it's naive to expect that a fair and appropriate group of experts would actually be assembled. That those people wouldn't be influenced by some organization, belief system, or whatnot. There is always going to be some bias on how you should raise your child. I'm an atheist. I wouldn't be surprised if a religious belief wouldn't be constituted in these rules in some way. What about spanking or grounding? The majority of "experts" out there today shun those practices. I grew up getting grounded, getting my car taken away or video games, getting a smack on the butt occasionally, etc. Those sorts of things may be "outlawed" or that basis of thought may invalidate my application to have children. What if I fake it through the test and then do that stuff later? Do you rip the child away from his home?
There's just no way to do this.
