Question

english in nursing school

i am asking to write about against parent licensing about 4 pages please use third person use 3 reasons if you can follow this order Topic: I dont support Parenting License Thesis: “Although" clause + claim + "Because" clause (3 specific reasons) Reason 1: Type of support: Reason 2: Type of Support: Reason 3: Type of Support:

write about why you support thay parents have to have license

ex: reducing child abuse and negligence

minimizing unfit people to have have children

just like any essay broo

Answer 1

Parental licensing involves restrictions on the freedom to parent a child that are imposed by the state on individuals who may never have mistreated children. In requiring that individuals be licensed, the state demands that they show some competency in being a parent before they actually become one in a social sense. Since typically, the relevant restrictions are prospective in nature—they occur before someone has had the opportunity to parent a child—what lies at the core of parental licensing is “prior restraint”; people are restrained in the activity of parenting prior to showing any incompetence in doing so (i.e., by harming a child)

In order to protect children from risks associated with bad parenting, some philosophers have recommended that all parents be licensed, in much the same way in which drivers of motor vehicles and many professionals, such as physicians, are licensed.

The Status Quo on Parental Licensing
Many philosophers have ignored or downplayed the fact that parental licensing actually occurs. In many jurisdictions, some individuals—namely,
adoptive and foster parents—must be licensed before they are legally allowed to parent a child. Although these people do not receive an actual license to parent, similar to a driver’s license, what they undergo is still properly called parental licensing. They are prevented from becoming a parent unless they complete a home study, which itself involves criminal background checks together with assessments of one’s financial
situation, physical and mental health, place of residence (i.e., whether it is child friendly), and family history including relationships with one’s parents and any current or previous spouse(s).
2 Additional requirements may include follow-up visits from social workers and, less commonly, attendance at government-mandated parenting classes.

Unlike the philosophers we have just discussed, others oppose the imposition of greater licensing on parents, and object in particular to universal parental licensing (with most of their work targeting LaFollette’s 1980 paper). Although these philosophers do not set out to defend the status quo, they are generally content with it—with the exception of Jurgen De Wispelaere and Daniel Weinstock, who believe the status quo should be reevaluated from the ground up (2012; more on their view below). Moreover, those who are satisfied with the status quo (i.e., on parental licensing) are not necessarily satisfied with the status quo on the extent to which the state monitors or supports parents. On the contrary, most of these philosophers contend that the state ought to invest more in parenting through greater monitoring of, or social assistance for, parents. Among the reasons philosophers have given for objecting to LaFollette’s (1980) proposal, and proposals like it, are that licensing will not effectively weed out people who would be very bad parents; that, overall, greater monitoring of parents by the state
is a better solution to the problems of child abuse and neglect than licensing parents; and that the problems of enforcing licensing schemes are too great. Let us commentbriefly on each of these objections.
First, some—such as Lawrence Frisch (1981) and David Archard (1990, 2004)—argue that it would be a mistake to license more parents because parental licensing would not in fact succeed in reducing child abuse and neglect. The reason is that it could
not reliably predict which individuals will mistreat their children. For example, Frisch suspects that most child abuse and neglect occurs in response to extraordinary social or economic stress, and that since licensing cannot duplicate these conditions and test how
people react under them, it cannot prevent child abuse and neglect (1981: 176). By contrast, Archard claims that child abuse is the result in part of individual
psychopathology, but that research on child abuse has so far failed to “produce a clear and distinct psychological picture of the abusing parent” (2004: 188). Hence, we cannot predict with sufficient accuracy which people will abuse their children and should therefore be denied a parental license.
Second, various authors have suggested that over time, licensed parents would have to be re-evaluated to ensure that they are still fit to care for their children. But if that is the case, then wouldn’t it be simpler, as these philosophers ask, simply to monitor parents’ treatment of their children in a more comprehensive way than we do now? Archard insists that such a solution would be less “cumbersome” than a system of repeat licensing (1990: 191). It also would not involve many of the difficulties of licensing, including the need to make predictions about people’s future performance in parenting, predictions that would have to “cover all eventualities” (Archard 1990: 191).
Third, there is the question of whether parental licensing could be enforced in a fair or reasonable way. This problem—variously described in terms of the “viability” (Engster 2010) or “feasibility” (McLeod & Botterell 2014) of licensing—receives its best
treatment from Daniel Engster (2010). Engster explains that it would be difficult to enforce parental licensing without causing women great hardship, and thus without furthering gender inequality. For example, women without a license to parent a child who experience an unplanned pregnancy would be forced to consider having an abortion or having a child with whom they were in a close physical relationship for nine months taken away from them (Engster 2010: 247-248). To be sure, they could try to hide their pregnancy, which would involve foregoing assistance from health care professionals during pregnancy and birth; but, of course, this option would pose serious
risks to their health and the health of their child (2010: 247-248). Men, on the other hand, would not generally face choices as distressing as these as a result of parental licensing. Even after the birth of their child, their situation would not be the same as that of women who give birth. For instance, given the unequal economic status between women and men, the choice between staying with a partner who is denied a parental license and keeping one’s child would not be as difficult, on average, for heterosexual men compared to heterosexual women (2010: 248). For Engster (2010), the disproportionate burden that widespread parental licensing would have on women is too great.These objections to a system of universal parental licensing are certainly compelling. Yet notice that the first two apply equally well to our current system of parental licensing. If we have no good way of predicting who will abuse or neglect children, then we should not be licensing any parents, assuming that our purpose in doing so is to ensure that people will not mistreat their children. Moreover, if we could
achieve this aim through the greater monitoring of parents rather than the licensing of them, then there is a strong case to be made for doing that instead. Philosophers who have expressed these concerns about universal parental licensing generally fail to
extend them to the licensing of adoptive and foster parents. For example, Frisch does not even mention this form of licensing, while Archard tries to justify it by pointing to the fact that “natural parents,” as he calls them, have a claim to “rear their own children” that seems, he says, to be stronger (he does not argue that it is stronger) than any claim an adoptive parent has to raise a child (2004: 189).8