Should people require a mandatory license for parenting?
Sir, Could I See Your Breeding License?
Why [...] are we so cavalier about who we let have and raise them? As technology enables more people to reproduce, environmental pressures make each new life a bigger burden, and our understanding of child psychology improves, it’ll become more and more evident that just because a person can have kids doesn’t mean they should have kids. My guess is that, decades down the road, future generations will require a license to reproduce and start a family. That sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
Most important is that children don’t have to grow up under horrible circumstances inflicted on them by the inability of their parents. You always have to weigh the freedom of some against any negative infliction it could have on others. In this case a bit less freedom would guarantee a lot less distress.
It is reasonable. I don’t see how we can ask for species-appropriate animal husbandry regarding animals like chimps but not children. You have to have a drivers license for good reasons too. So why is everyone allowed to rule over helpless human beings for years without having to prove their ability to do so in a way that guarantees the well-being of their protégé?
Such discussions always remind me about something important. Children should not be assigned with any religion. There should be a certain age where they can decide what religion they want to follow, if any. This doesn’t mean that religious people shouldn’t be able to have children but that they shouldn’t be able to force their children into a certain framework either. Parents should be forced to allow their children to take part in a educational framework based on contemporary ethics and knowledge. I don’t even have a problem with lessons in religion in school as it is part of human nature. But it shall not be focused on any truth value or a certain religion but an overview and comparison with non-religious ethics and truth-seeking.
The answer is more or less contained within the question.
Even before we get to deeper matters, I’ve got to question your enforcement methods. How would you prevent childbirth in unqualified couples? There really aren’t easy, inexpensive, reliable, side-effect-free and reversible methods of preventing pregnancy (IUDs and implants are the most effective, but aren’t tolerated by a non-trivial portion of the populace). Nor do these seem likely to be developed in the near future. Even if they are developed, there are pretty strong social norms involving bodily integrity, especially related to reproduction -- and honestly, I’d hope these norms continue to become stronger. Likewise, there are other norms that seem unlikely to weaken dramatically if we were to discuss, say, forced permanent sterilization, forced abortion, or ripping infants from the grips of tearful mothers.
How would you limit ‘assignment of children to religion’? Does it become illegal for bring a child to church? To pray at home? Even if social norms regarding freedom of religion disappeared overnight, the difficulty of enforcing such a system is rather severe.
AFR and adoption have strict criteria not a solely as licensing mechanisms, but also because there are high costs and limited supply—a natural limitation. That’s not really the case going the other way around.
At a deeper level, there are some non-intuitive economic reasons that essentially guarantee any entrenched democratically created licensing system undergoes regulatory capture, and serves the interests of licensees rather than those individuals it was made to protect. This system does not have a method for opposing such capture.
and
So by your standard it is okay to force children to take part in state mandated indoctrination, but not in parent mandated indoctrination. Why not take an even hand and allow children to direct their own learning?
Bad parents wouldn’t be so much of a problem if children were considered communal, rather than individual, responsibilities.
While I instinctively approve of licenses to parent, when I think on it I wonder if that might be too counter to human nature to ever enforce successfully.
And my deeper feeling is that it’s the “two parents have a kid, so the kid belongs to them” culture that causes a lot of the problems.
Turns out that some parents do require a mandatory license for parenting. A parent can end up before judge and be required to take a parenting course. These courses are all (as far as I can tell) evidence-based, developed and evaluated using sound science. Programs like: Incredible Years, Triple P, Kazdin Method.
Ironically, most parents, even those who read lots of parenting books, never encounter a parenting book that is primarily evidence-based. Most parenting books are opinion-based. The most recent evidence-based book that I know of is “Everyday Parenting” by Kazdin.
I would like to point out that my BS detector started jerking rather alarmingly at those words...
Well, I gave some specific references (Incredible Years, Triple P, Kazdin Method, Everyday Parenting by Kazdin). Have you checked them out?
Kazdin runs the Child Conduct Center at Yale and former president of the American Psychological Society. Incredible Years is a program developed at U of Washington.
What does it take to turn off your BS detector? I speculate that I can provide it.
There is also the Parent Management Oregon Model (PTMO) that originates with Patterson at U of Oregon. Patterson wrote the first evidence-based parenting book for a general audience (first that I know of) in 1977 called Living with Children. And, when he wrote it, some of the science was already 15 years old. That gets us back to 1962, which means you have 50 years of catching up to do. With any luck, I can set off your Future Shock detector.
In 1962, Montrose Wolf at U of Washington oversaw a series of interventions that showed that a care giver could reduce or increase specific child behaviors by 40-fold in 2 weeks. The method pretty much amounted to the caregiver cranking their neck in response to the kid’s behavior, redirecting their attention in other words.
With respect to parenting? A fair amount, I’d say.
If we are going to be talking about “sound science”, first I’d like to see relevant non-subjective quantifiable metrics which are reasonably stable across environments (e.g. cultural) and individuals. Then I would expect a description of the major mechanisms underlying behavior which should be pretty universal and reliably identifiable. And finally I’d want an ability to make forecasts, say what will happen in cases both with specific interventions and without.
Given that I don’t think psychology as a whole qualifies as “sound science”, I don’t really see how parenting advice can pull it off.
Why? It is possible and reasonable for a specific set of metrics to be (explicitly) specific to a single ‘culture’.
Why?
I agree about psychology as a whole. How about the practical part of behaviorism, operant conditoning?
It’s quantifiable and reasonably good at forecasts.
Surely you realize that stability across individuals if not really to be expected overall in detail. People don’t always react the same in detail because of genetic difference (as an example). Stabilty is likely not evidenced for the most extremely genetically different individuals, and it is not to be expected. Environment and culture can lead to variations as well. Stability is not to be expected in general, you just need to explain variation.
Operant conditioning is the foundation. In parenting, add to that the discovery that adult attention is a powerful positive reinforcer for most children. The methodological advances in parenting are largely built on that foundation.
It looks much more like engineering than like science to me. I don’t know it enough to have an opinion on how well it works.
Of course and that’s one of the reasons for me having doubts about the “sound science” label.
Post factum..? :-)
In any case, if it all worked as well as you claim, surely psychotherapy for kids would be very effective. I suspect this is not the case in reality.
Actually if it works as well as I claim, psychotherapy for kids might be less effective. It involves changing the kid’s environment. Psychotherapy can’t do that. You have to get the parents to be willing to change and give them training.
On the contrary, the fact that psychotherapy works at all is evidence that the operant conditioning methods I am pushing are not the whole story, and of course operant conditioning is not the whole story.
By your definition, medicine is not a sound science because stability overall in detail is not to be expected due to genetic variability.
It is not.
Notice how only recently the idea of “evidence-based medicine” appeared and how much pushback there was (and is) against that idea.
Seems Kazdin knows quite well how to perform reproducible measurements e.g. http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/HomePage/Class/Psy394Q/Research%20Design%20Class/Assigned%20Readings/Clinical%20Trials/Kazdin99.pdf
So, you’ve thrown in a link to a paper which you clearly didn’t even glance at because it has nothing to do with performing reproducible measurements.
Here is the abstract for you:
“The previous articles in this special section make the case for the importance of evaluating the clinical significance of therapeutic change, present key measures and innovative ways in which they are applied, and more generally provide important guidelines for evaluating therapeutic change. Fundamental issues raised by the concept of clinical significance and the methods discussed in the previous articles serve as the basis of the present comments. Salient among these issues are ambiguities regarding the meaning of current measures of clinical significance, the importance of relating assessment of clinical significance to the goals of therapy, and evaluation of the construct(s) that clinical significance reflects. Research directions that are discussed include developing a typology of therapy goals, evaluating cutoff scores and thresholds for clinical significance, and attending to social as well as clinical impact of treatment.”
Do note the part that mentions ambiguities regarding the meaning of current measures.
I did skim it and it adresses all the relevant aspects. It is indeed the first hit that came up but it does show a very rigorous and scientific treatment of the topic. It is also balanced in so far as it separated out statistical measures from other valuations (to a avoid calling it “bayesian priors” which he does’t claim):
So, do show where does this particular paper tell you how to, in your words, “perform reproducible measurements”.
Your quote talks about interpretation of measurements—it says nothing about how to make sure the measurement itself is reliable and reproducible.
It tells me that Kazdin knows quite well “how to perform reproducible measurements”, not how these measurements are carried out in particular. It seems that there are more papers out there that actually do this.
This sounds like to me as though it’s essentially a giant recapitulation of the trolley problem—you have one side claiming that the opposition doesn’t understand 5 > 1 and isn’t trying to maximize utility and should be pushing the fat man onto the tracks, and you have the other side not wanting to violate obvious moral norms such as “Don’t push people onto train tracks where they will die” for the sake of hypotheticals that are not merely unlikely but unrealistic. (How is that man so fat that he’ll block a trolley going fast enough to crush five other people, anyway?)
Then the first group argues that sometimes you need to be able to engage rational overrides when the situation is different from what you’re used to (or adapted to) and in this case we’re stipulating that the man is fat enough to stop the trolley if you push him onto the tracks, and the second group argues that you want bright-line ethical rules and guards against corrupted hardware and con artists trying to convince you to do evil deeds “for the greater good”.
If this statement is to be taken as a hypothetical stipulation similar to that of the trolley problem, I agree with the hypothetical breeding license.
As a real-life policy suggestion, though, it sounds like a terrible idea due to violating a lot of people’s moral norms (which will cause distress), having implementation difficulties (who will make/mark the tests for getting a license), being prone to frighteningly nasty abuse, and underspecification. Please do not take my support of the hypothetical stipulation as being in any way supportive of the actual policy suggestion.
The Family-Teaching Association certifies group homes in the use of evidence-based parenting methods. Everyone involved has to be trained and meet standards. These group homes have replaced what use to be call orphanages. A resident family-teaching couple has the role of parent for a group of kids. The organizations managing the group homes also provide support for troubled families as part of an overall system to deal with severe problems related to bad parenting.
So, at least, there is a licensing system geared to addressing the consequences of bad parenting.
Boy’s Town is part of this system. It was an early adopter of evidence-based parenting that converted to family-like group homes in the 1970s. Perhaps a rare occasion when a religious organization was on the cutting edge of science.
You raise interesting questions. However, I don’t think you give realistic solutions. Someone’s decision to let someone have a license would be biased, wouldn’t it?