A License for the Future

Many of our nation’s children are brought up in an environment that is ill conducive to their well-being and thus fails to provide them with necessary skills and traits requisite for future success. There are many things that contribute to molding a child’s personality—such as friends, television, and school. However, it is the parents that are the main determining factor in the child’s development, because they are the highest authority in regard to the child, by deciding such things as what schools the child will attend and directly as well as indirectly influencing the child simply through the relationship they share and the behaviors they set forth as example. Therefore, with this in mind, it is of the most crucial importance that there should be some form of parental licensing system established.
There must be a parent licensing system to ensure that children are in the care of capable guardians. Amid some of the incapable guardians can include the mentally handicapped, teenagers, and social delinquents. Individuals of these kinds may sometimes not be suitable parents merely from a lack of emotional stability as well as insufficient mental capacities necessary for understanding the needs of a child, inability to set their priorities straight due to immaturity, and also problems of the different kinds of abuse—physical, verbal, or even drug related. These are the kinds of conditions that are almost guaranteed to harm a child’s development. There are alternatives to leaving a child in the custody of biological parents, which include foster care and adoption. Foster care, however, can be a dreadful environment for a child to grow up in. Foster parents can oftentimes be abusive, and due to the child knowing that they are not with their biological parents they may have greater cause to rebel; this, along with abuse, may produce problems that send them from foster home to foster home, which, all of this being considered, is certainly an unstable environment for a...