Parental Licensing

The argument for Parental Licensing is that assessing whether parent’s can raise a child will help prevent child abuse. Parental licensing focuses on prevention rather than the current system which focuses on amelioration.   I think the main beguiling error with the proposal of parental licensing is the fact that every parent and future parent is being subjected to this “assessment”, because of the relatively smaller proportion of bad parents that harm their children. I think that parental licensing will lead to many unjust decisions (e.g. children taken away from their parents unjustly) mainly because the definition of what is a good parent is very unclear and the definition of a bad parent can be deeply influenced by prejudices. Also, an expansion of a stricter definition of “good” parent seems to be easily permitted.  The main flaw in parental licensing is not in principle. In principle, the idea has some validity. However, in practice this would lead to a lot of power of the legal system over individuals and even nonexistent individuals by determining who is able to reproduce and whether those who have reproduced “deserve” to keep their children. It is not really clear that an implemented policy of parental licensing will really distinguish between parents that are clearly abusive towards their children psychologically or emotionally and between those parents that are considered “irresponsible, inadequate, incapable” or simply not ideal parents.  This is an important error to notice because it raises the possible unintended consequence that more assessments of parents will lead to much more errors where children are taken away from parents (thus violating both the rights and welfare of the children and parents)  compared to the current system’s errors of taking children away from their parents unjustly combined with the errors of leaving children with abusive parents.