Licences for having Children...good idea???

Great Debates
21

e: whatever seems appropriate at the time in my judgment as a parent in situ;not necessarily any of the above; kites can be dangerous; they might be tempted to use them to injure persons or damage property; museums can be boring and might incite them to rebel against me. Pubs, however, can be community centres and can help to form strong social values (although of course I’d expect to accompany them).

BTW, I don’t think it’s a good idea to let young kids roam free in a city, but can you show a by a clear line of reasoned logic that the outcome is inevitably bad?

22

No I can’t, only anecdotal. But (again anecdotally) you have to see with your own eyes to believe the appalling standard of behaviour of children in the area of Dublin in which I live, and partially in agreement with the OP, “I blame the parents”. Who else is there to blame, especially since many of the little bollixes are below school age?

23

Sure, blaming the parents is one thing; stopping them from breeding is quite another (and this assumes that you would be able to predict is anyway).

24

To throw up another question:

Should the parents be jailed for the crimes of their offspring?

Would this discourage (a little) random over-breeding?

25

Different topic, but…

Say a family has 12 - 15 children. Neither parent works, just minds kids, changes nappies, fills in child benefit forms.

Should tax payers be subsidising their lifestyle, paying for the upkeep of their children? Should the financial responsibility of the parents be brought into question in this instance?

In the UK they would get given a large house and a whack of money to buy food etc… without having to contribute.

Is this something you would happily leave without legislating?

26

This idea has been brought up before by a radio talk show host and he gave some pretty good arguments for requiring people to take a parenting test before having kids. Sometimes, especially after watching Jerry Springer, I think it might be a real good idea. There’s a court TV show also where the Judge seems to spend most of her shows dealing with nasty kids that makes me inclined to consider parents having to get a license to bear children also.

The problem is, who will set the standards? Like, in one State, if you slap your kid, you go to jail, while in another, you do not. In another if you yell at your kid in an offensive way, Social Services can get involved while in yet another, they will not.

I don’t think I would like the government to set the standards.

27

Actually, I recently heard that the rate of teenage pregnancies were going DOWN, not UP, over the past few years. So I challenge the initiator of this thread to back up his claim that there has been a massive rise.

So let’s just pretend for arguments sake that the government starts to require licenses for having kids. Let’s be generous and say that fifty percent of child-desiring people actually go and do what’s necessary to get licensed. What happens to the other fifty percent who have kids anyway? Are you going to arrest them? Fine them? Sterilize them? Will they get to keep their kids? Or will we be flooding our already burdened foster care system with new cases? Seems pointless if the goal of licensing is to alievate crime related to bad childhoods.

And what happens to their kids? Will a stigma be attached to them because they were illegally conceived? I can already hear the names on the playground.

What’s the point of a license? All the parental training in the world won’t cure bad parenting, and I would be weary of the government telling me what I should and should not do with MY kids. You can’t learn how to parent from reading a manual and by requiring people to have licenses, you reduce parenting to just that: an instruction manual.

28

There is some oversight on who can become parents. Dangerosa eluded to this when he/she mentioned adoption. Any day now my wife and I should be taking custody of a child we are going to adopt. We have had to:
[ul]

  • Have federal criminal checks done.
  • Have a registered social worker perform a home study
  • Hi Opal!
  • Round up letters of recommendation.
  • Submit a financial history.
  • Complete many other forms on our “fitness to adopt”
    [/ul]
    While I have a hard time seeing how most of this has any reflection on our “fitness to be parents” they are requirements. While all of the above are relatively trivial, failure on any one point could prevent us from becoming parents.

Somehow adoption has to be regulated to weed out potential abusers and pedophiles. As a result a bureaucracy has been created to regulate the process.

Is it fair? Well, no. Neither is life. My wife works in an OB/GYN clinic and has seen the extremes: 45-year old women who have unsuccessfully tried to have children for fifteen years to 15-year olds who “only did it once.”

BTW Adoption in the US is primarily a matter of State law which varies widely.

29

Bear in mind this thread is multinational. IIRC, in the UK (England at least) it’s going up, and is now the highest in Europe.

30

I am against enforced childrearing classes. All it would do is shove whatever techniques are en vogue with the powers that be. At times or in different places this would be classes with a highly religious slant and others a humanist approach.

Some so called child experts offer classes where they teach that you should put your child on a schedule immediatly, havingthem sleep through the night within a few days of birth, slap and pinch infants as young as 6 months who cry too much and igonore children and let them cry for hours uncomforted to build their character. Wanna bet these assholes would be getting federal funds within days of a law for mandatory child rearing classes?

Child licenses would also commoditize having children. We don’t allow purchase of donor organs for fear it would commoditize human life, this is much worse. The license for bribes scandal here in illinois springs screaming to mind. Imagine if a young couple refused to pay the squeeze and were not allowed to have children? What about all those who must delay because they don’t have quite a nice enough house to qualify? Don’t think for a moment that income won’t be a factor. The working poor would not be allowed to reproduce freely. What are you going to do with unlicensed children? Take them away and give them to infertile couples who qualify for a license?

31

How would you administer this test?

Option A: before sex. Ok, what about people who have sex without having taken the test? Are you going to mandate reversible sterilization (a technology which does not yet exist) for all children until they pass their “sex license test”? Absent mandatory reversible sterilization, are you going to forcibly abort unlicensed pregnancies, throw the mothers in jail for having an unlicensed child, or just take the child away at birth and give it to a licensed parent? Perhaps we should just do away with sex entirely and decant future generations.

Option B: after sex, before birth. Same problem, what do you do to people who fail the test? What about people who get pregnant and give birth in secret?

Option C: after birth but before the hospital hands over the child to the parents. What about people who give birth other than in a hospital?

I see all of these options as horribly intrusive, difficult to enforce, and/or arbitrary. I don’t see how you can make any of these work without creating a police state.

And I haven’t even gotten into the issue of the impossibility of actually developing a test that reliably measures ability to be a parent that is both accurate and nondiscriminatory.

32

Instead of a licence, how about offering a parenting course and establishing a suitably strong incentive (e.g. a tax break) for those parents who take the course before bearing their first child?

-DP

33

Quite possibly the parents should be held responsible where the crimes of the children can be demonstrated to be rooted in neglect, abuse or some such, but I don’t think this would be effective in reducing the birth rate any more than, say, banning divorce would create a higher proportion of happy marriages.

34

I read an interesting proposal for reducing the birth rate. I almost posted it this morning, but refrained since this thread seemed to be focused on juvenile crime and parenting skills, rather than overpopulation. But it seems to be straying in that direction, so I guess I’ll go ahead and throw it out there.

I read it in Robinson’s Blue Mars, although I don’t know if he originally came up with the idea. (But hey, if it’s in a science fiction novel it must make sense, no?)

(Warning: It’s a little bizzare, but worth pondering, IMO. Note that it presupposes a population considerably greater than the current one, straining the earth’s “carrying capacity”)

The idea is: declare that everyone on earth has the right to bear 3/4 of a child. So every couple can have 1.5 children. The birthrights can be bought and sold. So a couple has a choice to have one child and sell the extra half-child, or purchase an extra half-child right from another couple.

This would do several things: For one, an overall reduction in world population. Certainly desirable. A couple who sold their extra birthright would have more money available to raise their one child, giving it a better life. A couple who had to pay for their second child would (conceivably) appreciate it more, since they had to sacrifice to get it.

Also, according to the author (or, I should say, the character) it would finally establish a fair market value for a human life. (Not sure why that’s desirable, but there you are.)

And no pesky parenting tests to administer.

(The program would continue until such time as the population reached some agreed-upon desirable level, and then be replaced with a 1:1 replacement system.)

35

Interesting idea as far as it goes in terms of fiction, but it would be enforced how?

36

Vasectomies are now generally considered reversible.
Information can be found at: http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/dept/urology/infertility/vasectomy/vasr0000.html
Unfortunately, this site claims only 70% success for vasectomies performed over 15 years ago.

I’ve often considered mandatory vasectomies at birth. Another option is to offer a hefty compensation to parents who are willing to have vasectomies performed on their sons at birth.

37

What a completely ludicrous suggestion! Setting aside the issue of the less-than-sterling reversal rate for vasectomies (70% is much higher than most claims I’ve seen, which range in the 10% to 25% range generally), those rates assume that the vasectomy was performed as an adult. There is no reason whatsoever to conclude that a childhood, let alone infant, vasectomy would be at all reversible (my guess is not). And 70% still means that one in three men will be sterile.

And what about the possibility of a man developing antibodies against his own sperm after a vasectomy? This can happen, you know.

38

Mangetout wroteL

Then, later, Dangerosa wrote:

Well, the thread ain’t ended yet…

39

:rolleyes: A better idea would just be to decapitate the babies and when they grow up into responsible adults, worthy of parenthood, simply stick their heads back on again with duct tape.

40

Of course, the parents could be compensated for the shock and general unpleasantness by providing them with a nice tin of soup.