Should Parenting Require a License?

Would you be okay if someone lacking all medical qualifications performed surgery on you? Is it fine for people with no legal knowledge to preside over court cases? If someone had no driving experience, would you be happy to share the roads with them?

Our answers to these questions are surely all the same: of course not. If an activity has the potential to harm others, and requires a degree of competence to perform successfully, then quite rightly we expect anyone performing the activity to be qualified.

Anyone responsible for the safety and wellbeing of others should be trained, tested, and appropriately certified. That’s just common sense.

So why, asks the philosopher Hugh LaFollette in his famous 1980 paper Licensing Parents, do we not require a competency check for raising children? As he puts it:

[P]arenting is a paradigm of such activities since the potential for harm is so great (both in the extent of harm any one person can suffer and in the number of people potentially harmed) and the need for competence is so evident…

Successfully raising the next generation of citizens is arguably society’s most important task. If done badly, there is tremendous scope for harm: given the cyclical nature of abuse, not only do children suffer at the hands of bad parents, they may then grow up to harm others themselves.

With the wellbeing of children and wider society at stake, why don’t we do more to ensure parents actually know what they’re doing?

What about the rights of parents?

One immediate response we might have to LaFollette is, but what about the rights of the parents? Licensing parents is not analogous to things like driving and surgical licenses, for a parental license would infringe upon a fundamental human right: the right to reproduce.

But many rights are conditional, LaFollette points out. We have freedom of speech and freedom of movement so long as we don’t use those freedoms to slander or stalk other people, in which case justifiable limits are placed upon us in the form of injunctions or restraining orders.

Our rights are thus coupled with our competencies, and the right to parent should be no different, LaFollette suggests. Given there is so much at stake, if we cannot demonstrate our suitability or competence, if we cannot understand the basic principles of parenting, then our right to parent should quite justifiably be limited.

People may have a right to reproduce, but children also have a right not to be abused.

Besides, there’s an important distinction to be made here between creating and raising children. LaFollette’s license wouldn’t prevent anyone from doing the former. He’s not saying we should sterilize people; he’s just asking us to consider whether the responsibility of raising children is something that requires better regulation.

Even this, however, may still seem like an uncomfortably radical, even abhorrent idea. Who wants the state turning up at their door to take away their children? Who wants faceless authorities designating who is and isn’t worthy of raising the next generation?

Wouldn’t parental licensing just usher in authoritarianism?

There are legitimate concerns here, but it’s important to get clear that LaFollette isn’t calling for an authoritarian dystopia, and he isn’t a fan of government overreach; he simply wants us to lower our hackles around this sensitive subject to adopt a more child-centered approach.

We should remember that the state already has mechanisms in place to remove children from dangerous households; but they are all reactive, resource-intensive, and generally involve significant challenges. By the time child services are able to gather the relevant testimony and legalities required to intervene, harm has already been done.

Licensing would aim to prevent harm taking place in the first place, for it would develop and test the competence of prospective parents before children even enter the household.

As with a driving test, prospective parents could retake the test as many times as necessary in order to pass, LaFollette suggests, perhaps receiving further support or coaching to remediate any problems in the meantime.

The idea, then, isn’t to standardize ‘good’ parenting according to a set of narrow prescriptions, penalizing anyone who doesn’t live up to them; the idea is to weed out people who’d make very bad, abusive parents — people who simply cannot grasp or demonstrate the basic principles of parenting. The vast majority would, one hopes, be licensed without issue, and be free to raise their children in their own way.

In an ideal world, parental licensing wouldn’t be required at all. Nor would airport security. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and so we must think pragmatically about the best ways we can reduce harm.

How could licensing parents possibly work in practice?

Of course, many questions remain. Who would design the test? Who would carry out the testing? Aren’t the tests open to corruption and prejudice? When is licensing supposed to take place? What happens if an unlicensed woman becomes pregnant? Would she be unable to take her newborn home with her from the hospital?

On this latter point, one suggestion from Claudia Pap Mangel in her paper ​Licensing Parents: How Feasible?​ is granting a provisional license, the conditions of which would require parents to secure a full license within a given timeframe.

And on testing and corruption, LaFollette thinks these are challenging practical problems shared by all regulatory programs, not just parental licenses. Risks can be mitigated as they are elsewhere: through careful laws, checks and balances, and independent review boards and judiciaries.

Besides, exactly how we implement it is up for discussion, LaFollette concedes. To inform our approach, we already have a whole host of procedures for qualifying adoptive parents.

And rather than enforced licensing, it could be rolled out as an ‘opt-in’ program. Parents who obtain a license could receive certain benefits like a tax credit or reduced childcare costs, for example. With this kind of incentive structure, unlicensed people could still raise children, but they’d miss out on valuable resources and support.

Voluntary ‘certification’ rather than enforced licensing

Maybe a major problem with LaFollette’s approach, then, has been branding, for the word ‘license’ conjures up images of frustrating, patronising, unsettling bureaucracy. Combine it with the word ‘parent’ and suddenly we find ourselves imagining a police state.

But if we change the word ‘license’ to ‘certification’, Mangel suggests, and wrap it in a package of knowledge building, childcare networks, tax credits, improved maternity and paternity leave, then immediately we have a much more appealing program.

Perhaps we could sanitize the idea even further. Voluntary parenting classes are already offered by various independent organizations. Certification could just be an added feature of these pre-existing classes — perhaps qualifying alumni for tax breaks if they meet a certain standard set by an independent national body, and informed by the latest in child development research.

The emphasis would no longer be on controlling who can and can’t have children, but on incentivizing people to better prepare for the responsibility of parenthood: certifications could unlock resources, help develop confidence, and prove competence.

Thinking this way, the argument begins to shift from the emotive arena of parental vs. child rights towards a more pragmatic discussion around the best way to reduce harm, support families, and take parenting seriously as a society. As Liam Shields put it in a 2020 essay:

When assessing parental licensing proposals, ‘Would it violate parental rights?’ is not the only or even most important question. Instead we should focus on the more complex question: ‘Is parental licensing part of the correct set of policies to respond to child abuse and neglect?’

Indeed, while licensing may be controversial, it’s much less so to say that society should take parenting seriously, and that more resources, education, and funding would help. The key question then becomes how better practices can be justly incentivized — and whether licensing and certification would play a useful or harmful role.

Rethinking natural sovereignty

Anyone can become a parent; but should anyone be able to raise children, if they haven’t proven a basic competency to do so? We have high standards for adoptive parents, so why not biological ones?

LaFollette thinks lurking beneath our intuitions is a primitive assumption that children are ‘owned’ by those who brought them into existence, that parents remain absolutely sovereign. No one can interfere, they’re mine.

This view is dangerous for children, LaFollette implores. We need to move on from our deeply-ingrained intuitions about natural sovereignty to a more child-centered view, ensuring every baby in society resides in a home that nurtures them, loves them, and enables them to live a full and flourishing human life.

What do you make of LaFollette’s arguments?

• Do you think a parental licensing or certification program would reduce harm? Is proactive prevention better than reaction? Or in practice would such a program do more harm than good?
• If a parenting test could be accurately designed and fairly administered, do you think it should be implemented?
• If we deem parental licensing unreasonable, why do we accept competency checks on adoptive parents?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• Laurie Ann Paul on How to Approach Transformative Decisions (Like Having a Child)
• ​Beyond Money: Martha Nussbaum on Living a Flourishing Human Life​
• Hannah Arendt On Standing Up to the Banality of Evil
• ​John Rawls: How a ‘Veil of Ignorance’ Can Help Us Build a Just Society​
• ​Political Philosophy: the Best 14 Books to Read

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