Should people have to prove they're qualified to raise kids before reproducing?

I didn’t read all your details but I do agree with you people should prove they are at least somewhat capable of raising children before they have them.
Because we all know making the kids is the fun part ,bringing them up is the work.
My wife and I chose not to have children and the older I get the more happy I become knowing we made the right choice.

To answer the question and not the dissertation:

No, I don’t believe one should have to procure a license to procreate. That would be an unacceptable human rights violation.

@Seek It’s too late for me to change my question’s title, or I would. It doesn’t really match what I said afterward.

In that case, what is the question?

I often see people that shouldn’t be reproducing and have the same thought.

…But then I remember that the potential harm that can (and likely would) come from having to get a license/proof of qualification to have kids would certainly be so much worse than the the potential “gain” from excluding idiots from having kids, that I inevitably reject the idea.

@Seek The question is whether I’m exaggerating how big the problem is of people being unqualified to be parents but doing it anyway.

If I’m exaggerating, I wanted to know what I was exaggerating about/how it can be proven that I was wrong.

If I’m not exaggerating, I wanted to know it, and I wanted to know what others thought should be done to solve the problem.

That “question” is not at all apparent (heh) from the question title or the following… argument.

But sure. Let’s go with that.

Yes, you’re exaggerating. For one, if someone shares with you their pregnancy, and your response is anything other than supportive, you’re kind of a dick.

You have no authority, moral, ethical or otherwise, to determine who is fit to parent and who is not.

When you are in your twilight years, someone is going to have to change your feeding tube and your adult diapers. You’ll be glad that person’s parents decided to breed then.

@Seek You’re misrepresenting what I was trying to say.

All I meant was that I become scared for the future of their children, because I care about those children. Caring about children isn’t being a dick, and isn’t the same as being unsupportive, unless I don’t get what “supportive” means to you.

When you say that I have no authority to determine who is fit to parent and who isn’t, I don’t get what you intend. Whether I have the authority to determine who’s a fit or unfit parent is irrelevant to whether they do as much damage as I think and to whether they should get away with it.

I don’t have any definite views on parenting. All I’m doing is putting forward partially formed ideas for review. The entire purpose of what I wrote was to acknowledge my own fallibility, and to try to improve. Being nasty about it does nothing to help with those goals.

I know my post was far from perfect, I’ve already said that.

It isn’t easy for me to expose my inner thoughts to an audience of strangers, and I (perhaps foolishly) hoped people here could be more respectful about it, or at least that they’d properly explain their counterarguments instead of just waving away the points I was trying to make.

Flagged as “not really a question” due to the original question being retracted, and combative nature of the OP to all responses.

@Lunar_Landscape: ”I don’t have any definite views on parenting.”

No? You just ranted on and on about your views on parenting, and refuted every response since.

Yes, not only qualities but also financial state, psychological condition, background check and so much more. Reproduction has gone out of control.

“It seems to me like most, if not all people, have kids for selfish reasons. It feels like parenting itself is an act of selfishness and is inherently evil.”
Of course it is selfish to decide to have children. It is selfish to decide not to have children. The good news is that when it involves a decision, it also involves forethought. Because an action benefits the self, if is not “inherently evil”. Your dramatic over-simplification of the concept is juvenile.

Most of your “observations” are gross generalizations, as evidenced by your repeated use of the phrase “too many people”. How many is too many? Yes, there are incompetent and bad parents. I have seen, however, a much greater percentage of good parents, and I’m guessing that I have a shitload more experience in this area than you do.

And yes, your details were a rant. You went on and on and on about how awful everyone (else) is. That’s a rant. Your “PS” add ones notwithstanding, your “I know it all” attitude is just arrogant and silly.
Too tired to revise? Then wait until you’re not, and delay submitting. We could’ve waited a bit longer before seeing this.
Really.

Probably. But then you risk ending up in the whole eugenics debate and nobody wants that.

I understand and share some of your concerns. It won’t happen because, as @Seek said, “human rights violation.”

I will say this however, before my wife and I could adopt my daughter, we had to submit to a lengthy process that included “not only (an assessment of our) qualities but also financial state, psychological condition, background check and so much more”* (they measured the rooms in my house and the BTU output of my heating system). She was 1-years-old.

* Courtesy of @ZEPHYRA

While I understand your concerns, I do have some questions…

@Lunar_Landscape: “To me, what those people are doing is a crime against humanity, but I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who even notices it”

Every parent seems to believe that they know how to parent and that everyone else has it wrong. You’re not the only one.

@Lunar_Landscape: “Whenever “We’re expecting” comes up, for some reason the reaction is always “That’s the greatest thing ever, I’m so happy for you”, as if them deserving to be a parent is a foregone conclusion”

The “I’m so happy for you” reaction is often a genuine reaction due to the fact that when we care about someone, we want them to be happy. If having children is something they wanted, it’s a reasonable reaction to feel happy for our friends and family who are pregnant. We’re usually not making an evaluation of their potential parenting ability.

@Lunar_Landscape: “Too many people make the decision to be parents from a place of pure emotion, and disregard logic.”

As logical as we all believe ourselves to be, logic isn’t- and probably shouldn’t be – the only motivator in decision making. If this were the case, I suspect your life would look completely different (or wouldn’t exist at all).

Don’t forget that whatever else humans are, we’re reproducers. As a species, we are what we are because of reproductive fitness. It might help to view things in light of evolution.

@Lunar_Landscape: “When I find out that someone is going to be a parent, I don’t get excited about it, I usually get scared about it, and lose a lot of respect for them. Nothing I’ve seen yet has proven to me that unfit parents are the minority and not the norm; it feels mathematically impossible.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but do you feel that there is a set of criteria that makes a parent “fit”? Are there multiple fit ways to approach parenting, but many more unfit ways? And do you feel that most people are unfit, and therefore you assume that parent is unfit?

If so, what is this criteria? What method(s) did you use to determine this? You mention that schools should be teaching these skills. Since everyone has their own idea of what is the right way of parenting, what would be the process of developing educational standards in this area?

Look, I get that there are egregious cases that most of us can agree are unfortunate. My wife works in maternity (lactation consultant), and has seen more than a handful of nightmare situations. However, as bizarre as this sounds, I don’t think there is such a thing as qualified parents – at least by your standards. And if our concern is truly about minimizing harm to conscious creatures, parenting is only one possible consideration. Our efforts in this area might involve intentionally making humans extinct.

I do have some questions, however.

- What are you really concerned about re: parenting and reproducing? Are you concerned about the creation of a conscious creature with the ability to suffer, or are you concerned that human suffering is not being minimized due to lack of parental qualification?

- What would the ideal scenario be? Paint a picture for us. Tell us what we should all do to act “logically”.

No. We need less intrusion into our lives, not more.

@Seek – In the US, controlling permission to procreate would, indeed, be considered a human rights violation. China instituted a one-child policy in 1978 – 80. It was changed to a two-child policy last year. China, I realize, is a Communist government with central planning and operates within that framework. I do not recall much of an uproar from the Western Europe, the US, or other nations condemning the China policy. I think that it appeared to the world as a necessary step to control population.

By whose standards?

No, they shouldn’t.

Yes, I think you are blowing things out of proportion, as others have stated.

Let’s say somehow a law such as that could be rammed through, it would be irrelevant because most kids are born not because they are planned but because the parents wanted to boink like bunnies; they were only concerned about their physical pleasure and being a parent was the furthest thing from their mind. Add in the fact the law allows a woman to further self-satisfy herself that if she did the crime, she can get out of doing the time by going to Planned Parenthood and having them assist in assimilating or murdering the interloper they spawned from their lustful act because their life will have to change because of it. It sounds good, but there are too many outs people can shirk the responsibility of people a parent, oh snap, they just let the women escape; equality at its best

I’m going to address the first comment you made in the details: “I’m not advocating that the government be given the power to control human reproduction, that would be dangerous.” What if, by whatever standards, it was determined, by whatever agency, that a person was not fit to be a parent, what do you do then? How do you control their reproduction?

No
We had kids because we knew how fantastic we’d be as parents & by definition, how great our children would be & guess what…right on all counts :)

I don’t think anyone should have to prove themselves qualified before having kids. Nor do I think having children is a “crime against humanity” (par. 3)—that’s a phrase I reserve for things like genocide.

Like others have mentioned, doing so would be an egregious human rights violation. To phrase it kind of oddly: we have a right to autonomy of body, which includes the right to decide whether to use our bodies to grow other humans (we’re mammals—that’s kind of our shtick). Bodily autonomy is a very good thing. We don’t want it taken away, especially in decisions as fundamental and impactful and childrearing.

And, as others have said, we really can’t answer what a “good parent” is—to reiterate, basically every parent thinks others are doing it all wrong. (I mean, geez, that’s even true between spouses. If I had a nickel for every time my parents were sure the other one was parenting wrong…)

Does not having a universal “good parenting” definition mean I don’t have a right to disagree with other parenting styles? Of course not. I have the right to disagree. I even have the right to discuss these disagreements with others—maybe we walk away with unchanged opinions, maybe we walk away thinking about something differently. But I don’t have the right to try and force that other person to behave according to my opinions any more than they have the right to try and force me. Again, this is a very good thing.

And it’s not like we don’t have ideas of what bad parenting would be. That’s what systems like Child Protective Services are kind of all about. There are limits to what society as a whole is willing to let a parent do to a child. I’m not in that line of work, but I understand that some jellies are. They can tell you how complex and nuanced and serious it is.

Your question, if I may, although it focuses on individuals’ abilities to parent, seems to perhaps be reacting in a more general sense against the presentation of parenting at once as a forgone conclusion—“the ‘that’s just what you do’ axiom” (par. 5)—and a romanticized ideal—“if they just have kids, bliss and fulfillment will automatically follow” (par. 8).

I agree that in some sense having children can often be presented as the default, and that parents often speak of raising their children as an incredibly meaningful experience (which can be distorted into children = fulfillment). But I think it’s a mistake to jump from those two ideas to the conclusion that parenting is fundamentally a thoughtless, selfish, harmful enterprise. I think it’s also a mistake to jump from the idea that “parents aren’t perfect” to the conclusion “parents shouldn’t be parents.”

By the way, as I’m writing this, I’m pretty sure that I don’t want children. But I don’t think in any way that my not-wanting-children is more responsible or more thought out than another person’s decision that they do. I’m just another human making decisions about my life and who I bring into it.

Also, what happens when you situation, financial means for example, changes drastically? Or someone becomes mentally ill in some way?

Maybe children should be on temporary birth control surgery until they get married. Not that I approve. In one African nation it is illegal to have sex out of marriage. Even for children and adults.

Being married is really the least of the problems.

While I think the world is severely overpopulated (google the “mouse utopia” experiment), I don’t think the government or any private body should have the power to forbid people from having children. Rather, I would advocate for incentives to have no children, and disincentives to have more than 1.

No. Because one, as @Seek has already mentioned, it would be a violation of fundamental human rights and two, there is absolutely no way to accurately predict who will be good parent and who will be bad parents. Good and bad parents can be found at all socioeconomic levels, among all races and ethnicities, among atheists and believers, among all levels of education and most levels of intelligence, and in any town, city, rural area or suburb in the country and among all political ideologies. If you can come up with some set of criteria that can absolutely predict good parenting, and predict the future, to ensure that nothing happens that might turn good parents into bad parents, then maybe it might work but I don’t think that’s possible

I had a temporary son who, as a teenager, I would have never, ever pegged to be a good parent. Well, he’s all grown up now, has 2 kids, and he is the second best father in the whole world! The love he has for his kids shines out of his eyes like a laser heart. The 1st best father in the world is my Actual Son, but I always knew he’d be a good dad to the 12 kids he said he wanted, when he was 5.