I have an idea, what if we made a license for parenthood?

[Andreas]

What if we had a mandatory test to get a liscense for raising kids? There is way to many poor kids that gets obesity and neglected these days. It would solve a lot of mental health problems too that todays millennials face. We could perhaps stop most child abuse too. Im not talking about banning people from getting kids, but keeping them and raising them. It’s like being allowed to own a car, but not use it.

What do you guys think?

[Rookie]

Those are some great intentions, but there are a lot of issues that immediately come to mind regarding regulating and enforcing this license, and how any group of people have the power to create an arbitrary test that an entire country must now adhere to so that they may have children. The backlash would be astronomical, and, depending on how many people pass the test, we could see a major plummet in birth rates, a growth in black markets and a mass migration out of whichever country this license was enforced in. 

From my perspective this is too radical, and will only create more problems than it hopes to solve. You can't stop obesity, neglect and child abuse by denying unconscious parents of their children. Societies tend to be pro-natal, and a HUGE chunk of the population believes that having a family = happiness. They won't just let this law pass through. They won't just go on as normal when they see other adults who were allowed to have children while they weren't. All kinds of violence and community issues would arise from this license. 

A better hope is just waiting for new male birth control methods to come online. Depending on how effective and available it is, it could systemically wipe out teenage and unwanted pregnancies for a whole generation, without causing massive backlash. 

Big Pharma's putting up a mountain's worth of red tape on those methods ever seeing the light of day, but it should help curb the births of children into poor, broken, and abusive households/communities. 

 

[Andreas]

Yeah maybe it’s a bit too extreme. But I think that we should get some kind of mandatory classes for future parents and checkups for the kids. Combined with AI, I think this could provide massive amounts of value to our future generations. 

[saffron]

There would be no way to enforce it. Sounds like a great idea but just won't work.

[Rilles]

I want to stop or decrease child abuse through my life purpose but this is not the way to go. Spreading knowledge and increasing empathy is the only way.

[Andreas]

4 hours ago, Rilles said:

I want to stop or decrease child abuse through my life purpose but this is not the way to go. Spreading knowledge and increasing empathy is the only way.

I mean isn't this what the cps does allready? Personally I would love if someone took me away instead of leaving me to my abusive family.. 

[Lynnel]

On 12/12/2018 at 3:58 PM, Shiva said:

And what happens when you get kids without the license?

Will you go to jail? Pay a huge fine? In this case what happens to the kid?

If a politician seriously proposed this, I'm afraid people would throw shoes...

Honestly, sometimes control and boundaries allow more freedom.

For instance, you need to get training to drive a car and pass an actual permit to understand what you're doing and not just drive randomly and crash and kill people.

Why would you not have some form of teaching/tests for a skill AS IMPORTANT as parenting ? If we make the test quite rudimental to pass and it would only discredit 5% of the population such as hardcore alcoholics and extremely abusive people, those would slowly dissapear. You could then make the test a bit more complex to encourage more healthy behaviours and slowly slowly triage but of course that's pure speculation.

[Hello from Russia]

Things is, this type of idea has the potential to fuck up birth rates (as having kids will become more of a hustle with this kind of thing) and it goes against the collective ego agenda of most develoloped\developing countries

Edited December 14, 2018 by Hello from Russia