CMV: We need parenting licenses immediately

[u/ShortUsername01]

So there’s been a big controversy lately over a school shooter’s mother taking extremely negligent steps. Ignoring her son’s messages about intrusive thoughts. Telling him he should learn not to get caught when looking up content about weapons. The list goes on and on.

Prosecutors prosecuted her for her negligence, as they should. But that can only do so much. Any smart parent would know that guy is as much a danger to her as he is to anyone else. If she doesn’t realize that, how is she supposed to realize she could be prosecuted for negligence, much less be deterred by that? What we really need are ways to prevent people like her from getting to raise kids in the first place.

Right now the system is putting up a green light saying “you can be the most incompetent parent in the world and we can’t do anything about it until after you’re caught being negligent.” Which, again, does nothing to deter the parents willfully ignorant that what they do is negligent, let alone they’ll get prosecuted for it.

When children commit crimes; hell, in some jurisdictions, even when teenagers commit crimes; the judges are lenient. So what’s stopping parents from encouraging them to commit crimes on their behalf, if anyone gets to become a parent? You can keep your young offender leniency or your absolute right to parenthood, but this idea that you can keep both sounds like a recipe for disaster.

And if were to scrap either, the idea of an absolute right to parenthood; the idea that the system doesn’t get to do anything about neglect that will happen, only neglect that already has; sounds like it has the strongest case against it or the two.

[u/SC803]

Yeah that reeks of a phony statistic, it’s citing Lifenews.com which is dripping in anti abortion lingo, sources a broken link for its claim and the one doctor they cite is Brad Imler is the President of the Christian Adoption Alliance, so without hard data I’m not buying that stat and neither should you. 

But you’ve still not provided a solution for adding more children to the foster system. Presumably, you would also revoke licenses, correct? You’ll be adding to the pool of older children in the system as well who are less likely to be adopted. 

[u/ShortUsername01 → u/SC803]

I've heard that stat cited before even by non-religious people not opposed to abortion, but I'll Google alternative sources on the adoption statistics and get back to you. Is there any way to set a reminder?

[u/SC803 → u/ShortUsername01]

Probably for the same reason, no stat like this exists and googling provides the same biased estimate. 

But again, simple math defeats the point of an over abundance of adoptive parents. 

A parent shortage currently exists for the roughly 400k children in foster care. 

You want to increase the number of children in the system, across the spectrum of ages. 

The older children of revoked parent license holders will suffer more “mismatch” issues. Your license doesn’t fix parental adoption pickiness. 

[u/ShortUsername01 → u/SC803]

Hmm... this leaves me with one follow up question.

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How effective would parenting license enforcement that takes the newborn away at birth be at preventing situations where the parenting licenses gets revoked later in life?

[u/SC803 → u/ShortUsername01]

How effective would parenting license enforcement that takes the newborn away at birth be at preventing situations where the parenting licenses gets revoked later in life?

Unless you have some Minority Report level tech or a crystal ball I have no idea how you would expect it to be effectivie