Should One Have to Pass a Test Before Becoming a Parent?*

Should One Have to Pass a Test Before Becoming a Parent?

You need a license to drive a car. You need a certificate to practice medicine. You need years of training before someone lets you argue a case in court.

But any two people; regardless of mental health history, financial stability, emotional maturity, or even basic knowledge of child development ,can bring a human being into the world and be handed full legal responsibility for that child with zero vetting🥲.

No interview. No assessment. No questions asked. On the surface, requiring some form of parenting qualification seems not just logical, but overdue.

And then you think about it longer.

The moment you start designing this “test”, you run into a problem that doesn't have a clean answer: who writes it? Because whoever writes the test decides who passes. And history has shown us, repeatedly and brutally, that when governments get to decide who is "fit" to reproduce, the people who fail that test are almost never the powerful.

They are the poor.

Ethnic minorities. People with disabilities. They are people whose lifestyles the state disapproves of. This is not a hypothetical fear ; eugenics programs built on exactly this logic existed in the United States well into the 20th century, in Nazi Germany, in Canada, in Sweden.

"Fitness to parent" became a polite phrase for state-sanctioned discrimination. So the idea collapses,but not entirely, because the problem it was trying to solve doesn't go away.

Children are suffering right now at the hands of parents who are genuinely unequipped ,not because they are evil, but because they are traumatized, or addicted, or mentally ill without access to treatment, or because they were themselves raised in environments that gave them no model of healthy parenting.

A child does not choose their home. They cannot opt out of neglect or abuse. And society, for the most part, intervenes only after damage has been done ; after the broken bones, after the developmental delays, after the years of emotional starvation.

The more honest version of this conversation is not about tests sha. It is about support. Mandatory parenting education ; accessible, culturally sensitive, and non-punitive, which can do more good than any gatekeeping mechanism.

Robust mental health infrastructure. Economic safety nets that reduce the desperation that makes bad parenting more likely. Community structures that don't leave parents isolated with children and no help. Probably if we can have all of this stationed and working ,we can have happy children again…..