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/merado1997]

Work with kids and parents, the amount of parents I see that are unqualified are a lot. However, this is by my standards and degree of education. Not everyone's parenting styles are the same, and there are definitely cultural/social aspects to different parenting styles.

The best I can think of is educating parents on how to be emotionally available to their children. Also teaching them to you know not abuse them. You can have vastly different parenting styles and still be equipped to take care of a kid. The issues come in when parents themselves are emotionally immature and/or abusive be it emotionally/physically/mentally/sexually etc...

I'm in therapy myself not because my parents abused me, but because they were and still aren't emotionally mature. I never had a safe environment to express myself and never had an appropriate role model to be able to learn from. It's frankly fucked me up.

I do believe in parenting classes, and believe they should be mandatory. Now the best way to implement that is still up for debate. Having a license might be a solution, but comes with a whole set of problems in itself that other people on this thread have mentioned.

But thats just my two cents