License for Parenting?

At the risk of being termed as a 'fundamentalist' and being severely criticized and hated for the view I am about to present, I have been able to bring myself to express this today in public:

                              "There should be a license for parenting"

My reasons for saying the above line can perhaps best be explained with the following reasoning:

I am not against reproduction-it is but of course a natural process, a biological one, to be precise. But ‘parenting’ is NOT. It is not an innate ability, like the ability to eat and digest food, or to breathe, but rather an ability that requires the development of certain skill sets. I wonder what on earth makes us believe that we would make ‘good parents’ just because we are over and above a certain age now and because we possess the biological ability to become parents now. It is like saying “I am now 18 years old, eligible to drive a car and hence I drive a car”. But does that translate into “hence I am a good driver?” To be a good driver and before even learning how to drive, one needs to understand the car first (yes our process of learning how to drive a car is also flawed by the way). Once you’ve understood the car, the parts it’s made up of, how its machinery works, what type of fuel you need to put in it, then you get to learning how to drive.

Parenting is exactly like that. A basic understanding of a ‘child’ is necessary-what does a child feel, how does the child express his/her feelings, when and in what way? What does the child’s world comprise of? What are his/her dreams/ fantasies, how does his/her imagination work? How does the child feel loved-through words or actions? Then we need to learn the strategies to handle the child at various crossroads. We must learn to switch gears with them every day because there will be speed breakers and rough roads. We must learn to balance our delivery of freedom and responsibility with them when they are climbing uphill towards achievement, just like the half clutch. When there is a ‘traffic jam’ in their lives we must learn to become the silent traffic cop, directing them out of the jam… and when we cannot agree with them and their opinions, we must learn to ‘parallel park’ our views with theirs-agree to disagree?

To be a good driver, one is also particular enough to choose a ‘good’ driving school. What school do we go to, to become ‘good’ parents then? Oh that’s right; we don’t, because our school for that is our own parents. So very often we try to apply the same “because I say so” attitude to a generation of children that has google giving them all the answers, unlike yester years when parents had all the answers. And then we make the gross mistake of ‘demanding’ respect from them instead of earning it. Well…google earned its respect from them. And why not? It upgrades itself every minute perhaps to make itself more ‘user-friendly’ with its applications, functions and options and takes into account the needs of its customer. How much do we upgrade ourselves to become ‘child-friendly’ then? No wonder as adults we are often faced with situations where we cannot give a rational answer to a very valid and rational question from a child. And the laziest and most pathetic approach to such a situation is that very “because I say so” answer.

I am not implying here that they should be given all the freedom in the world-but most of it, yes. And this will almost sound like a threat to many of us isn’t it? Because what then is our significance in their lives if we cannot scold them (for no valid reason) and assert our presence on them as parents in a hierarchical sense? (The problem does not lie in giving freedom, the problem lies in giving freedom without imparting the skill sets for responsibility & accountability to handle that freedom). Dictatorship and authoritarianism as schools of thought come from one’s insecurity about ‘control’ over others while democracy comes from investing ‘trust’ in others. Giving freedom comes from a ‘secure place’ and not from an ‘insecure place’. If we worry about whether to give children freedom, it just means that we do not trust our own database of knowledge and values and our process of ‘knowledge/value transfer’ to them. How then are we capable of becoming parents? It’s like a salesman selling a product that he doesn’t believe in.

Coming to the word ‘license’ as I’m sure many will find the idea of licensing parenting as harsh or ridiculous. Before I put forth my point, let me state here that 192 countries over the world (including India) have ratified a UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I work with kids and I get to see the results of ‘inappropriate parenting’ before my eyes very often (was that politically correct enough?). Now, speaking for India, some of us dismiss the RTO’s authority to give us a license and drive without a license anyway and well…some of us learn driving skills and then appear for the exam until we qualify for a license (no prizes for guessing that the latter would make good value transfer).

What I’m trying to hint at, is that we drive ourselves to undergo ‘change’ in order to qualify for that license, which involves the learning and unlearning of a lot of habits, attitudes and perspectives. So if parenting had a license, wouldn't we be positively driven to improve upon ourselves and manage to achieve something that eludes most humanity- change? and that too, through the most natural human instinct (wanting to become a parent) as the basis for our motivation?ek teer se do nishaan?

The problem with this idea, apart from the fact that most humans do not want to change, is that we can never accept an external figure to decide something so personal for us-whether or not we qualify to become parents?Who will decide? I mean… we are OK with all the marketing wizards influencing our children (more than ourselves) with advertisements of their brands splashed across buildings, buses and shopping carts, influencing their choices, their education and hence their market value in future but how can we give someone else the power to tell us that ‘you need to change to become a good parent’? You must be joking! We choose to have all the sense of individual identity as per our convenience then, don’t we?

If a driving instructor teaches you bad driving, you could crash someday and lose your life. No individual has the right to devalue another’s life. Parents are the instructors who equip us with the skills required to drive the car of life. There may soon come a time when humans may really have to stop breeding… (Have you seen the plight of the earth? and I think the earlier the better), but if we really must breed...and cannot control our incessant obsessive need to pass on our identities (which makes me wonder how weak our identities are) …then why not breed with some integrity and value-creation? Is that not reason enough for us to look at parenting as a separate entity from reproducing and give it its due respect?

April 30th, 2011, 9:25 PM

Pune, India