Should parents be licensed and trained?

Vegetarian parents starve their baby to death….Mother drowns her five sons….Teenage mother throws newborn into the garbage….Toddler beaten to death by stepfather….Girl molested by father….Boy suffers brain damage from abuse.

These are some of the headlines we see in the news daily. Incidents of infant and child abuse are on the rise in America. The National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect notes that child abuse has tripled in America over the past three decades. And these are just reported cases. It is estimated that the majority of cases are never reported, because they happen behind closed doors.

And many more cases of emotional neglect also go unreported as well, yet are equally devastating to those individuals involved.

To address this problem, Jack C. Westman and Charles D. Gill wrote a book called Licensing Parents: Can We Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. The authors have verbalized what many in the profession have been advocating for years.

We require licenses and training for people who want to drive a car, and we require them for people to get married. The skills required to be a parent are much more complex than the skills required to drive a car. And it is certainly more important to society to have skilled parents who can raise well-adjusted children than it is to have skilled drivers who can drive safely on our highways.

How would this work? Parental licensing and training could be administered by government agencies. Newly pregnant women and their spouses (or boyfriends) would be required to register and sign up for psychological testing, parenting classes and counseling.

The testing would be a way to weed out those parents who are too emotionally disturbed to care for children. Classes and counseling would ensure that all parents would receive training and insight into themselves. One of the most important parenting skills is self-analysis: parents must be able to look at themselves objectively to understand how their own behavior is affecting their children. They need to understand how they displace violence, depression or anxiety onto their children.

Despite the rise in child abuse, a large percentage of the populace will oppose parent training and licensing. People say it would be yet another government infringement on the rights of parents—“Big Brother is watching!” Parenthood, some feel, is a sacred right that should not be interfered with by the state.

Either we interfere with parents and monitor their child rearing, or parents are going to interfere with society by producing a slew of abused and neglected children who later become maladjusted and dysfunctional adults.