Licensing parenthood I

Many of the human race are poor or terrible parents. Bad parents raise screwed-up kids who become screwed-up adults faster than the rest of us can therapize, teach or coerce them into a semblance of civilization.

In the last 4000 years or so during which civilization in roughly the modern form has existed, we apparently AS A GROUP have learned nothing. Individuals have become highly skilled as parents and teachers and therapists, but as a whole, we have not improved at all. We teach rage and greed and selfishness and religious bigotry; we raise criminals and killers and rapists and child abusers. We sow the wind; we reap the whirlwind. The human race, in spite of the knowledge of individuals, has chosen to remain on the first rung of parenting skills, if that. And even if we don’t know as much about positive skills in parenting as we should, we certainly know a lot of things that are flatly wrong and damaging.

I see people in my office whose parents started them on drugs or alcohol or sex before the children even knew what they were. Every day we see in the papers articles about children who were savagely beaten or killed by their parents. Girls are pimped out on the street at 10 or 12 to provide money for their parents’ drug use. These situations are, unfortunately, common; but what doesn’t often make the front page of the paper are the many instances of casual verbal and physical violence that don’t come to the attention of the authorities. The amount of psychological damage that ensues is impossible to measure.

Some young women pop out babies just to have money from DHS (Welfare, in Oklahoma); DHS pays out the money but has inadequate resources to insure adequate skills in the parents. People don't even have to know what causes babies to feel free to have them. Some young men think it is a mark of their "manhood" to father children they have no intention of helping raise. I recently saw a 20+ male wearing a lot of "bling" (real gold jewelry) who was proud of fathering 7 (at least) children whom he had seen once or twice and whom he had absolutely no intention of helping raise or support.

I'm quite sure that 3000 (or 30,000) years ago the situation was not significantly different. Perhaps the human race long ago was benefited by sheer numbers of people, regardless of quality. And that's the point: no matter what advances in science or psychology of parenting we make, we are not using them any more to raise our children than in our primitive pasts. We have increasing quantity and apparently decreasing quality.

The place to stop bad parenting is before bad or inadequate people become parents. We need to license and limit the production of babies. We need to stop human animals from breeding until they stop being animals.