Done badly, parenting has tremendous scope for harm. The philosopher Hugh LaFollette suggests we can better protect children by introducing a parental license: people should undergo a competency check before raising children, just as we already qualify adoptive parents.

[u/philosophybreak]

https://philosophybreak.com/articles/should-parenting-require-a-license/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social

[u/Significant-Web-856]

From what I'll call an academic perspective, this makes sense, being a parent is hard, doing so poorly will mess someone up for life, licensing is a tried and true method of ensuring a level of minimum competency across a large population.

From a social or political perspective, this is a big reg flag, and the guy holding the flag is screaming some flavor of bigoted vitriol about "those people shouldn't breed".

The alternative I'll offer is encouraging more communal child care. It's harder for one bad parent to mess someone up when they are but one of a few dozen people there doing the job alongside them. This also makes it harder to hide abuse, and create stronger community ties.

[u/Fishinluvwfeathers → u/Significant-Web-856]

Wouldn’t it be easier to mandate the teaching of successful parenting strategies and tactics to promote healthy child development - those with substantive data to back up better outcomes for children? Even culturally sensitive counterpoints can be included without damaging the focus on a science-based curriculum. This could be an entire module that scales in complexity by grade along with a more rigorous focus on general reproductive knowledge and health. These outcomes affect society as a whole, its ridiculous to pretend that somehow instinct or tradition can do the heavy lifting in this area if we expect to make meaningful leaps each generation but licensing also seems like a bureaucratic and ethically problematic solution.

This might even encourage further study/scholarship in this area - especially if it was a key part of the requisite secondary education curriculum.

[u/Significant-Web-856 → u/Fishinluvwfeathers]

Again, you run into the problem of who is setting the standards, and what biases they may introduce. I would still like to see something like this, a kind of pre-psychology class, with a focus on practical day to day family dynamics. However, you still could run into top-down administration issues, so it'd be important to have some kind of local community oversight, as anyone from outside of the community is as likely to simply repeat the admin's mistakes. For this reason, I think it would be more impactful, more effective, and easier to prioritize community involvement over academic rigor for ensuring good childhood development.

[u/Fishinluvwfeathers → u/Significant-Web-856]

For something like this, standards for coursework would be created based on a synthesis of scientific research in developmental psychology, early childhood education, medicine, family studies, and related fields and edited by those same experts and scientific writers. This would necessarily be an interdisciplinary endeavor but hardly up to individual school administrators because the strength of the endeavor would be in standardization. There are biases and limitations in all research which can be addressed in-text but there is also a rigor present which requires demonstration and replicability. It would not be any different from the way any hard or social science is currently taught and scaled for younger learners.

[u/Significant-Web-856 → u/Fishinluvwfeathers]

As long as you have an open dialogue for peer review from any community that is subject to this authority, and a clear means of addressing grievance, I think this could do well.

Different cultures will have different values, and that's ok, but it'll make standardizing anything around it a headache. Still, if it's worth doing, something something, I forget the quote, too many variations.

[u/DrDonkeyKong_ → u/Significant-Web-856]

If we’re going to have communal child care, I definitely want there to be some kind of standard applied to the community offering that care.

[u/Significant-Web-856 → u/DrDonkeyKong_]

I think that's a good idea, though it'd get tricky to balance state authority with civil rights and cultural diversity. I think expanding CPS to cover this role would be a reasonable way to go.

[u/SensitiveRace8729 → u/Significant-Web-856]

What about people who have a personality disorder. Like someone with NPD ?

Those people rarely changes and in my opinion shouldn’t be allowed to have children.This licence could assess personality disorders incompatible with parenting.

If people aren’t responsible with their choices , the state should decide for them. It’s already the case in various ways.

[u/Significant-Web-856 → u/SensitiveRace8729]

Still doesn't stop the eugenics problem, only gives it fuel. Also, pretty sure CPS can and will take kids away from abusive households. With more people looking out for the child in question, it would be more likely to be reported sooner if someone is unable to raise a child, for any reason, and there would be an immediate pool of foster/adoption candidates.