Jared Raymond
March 14, 2015

Today’s world is nothing like the world our grandparents lived in or even our parents, things have changed with time. The world was so simple and we didn’t have all of this technology to distract us from life. We had freedom, sure, but there were rules that came with that freedom. The norm back then was to find a partner, marry them, move in together, and then have sex and start a family. I feel that is one of the reasons that many of our grandparents are still together and why the divorce right was way down. People were smarter and more mature and thought about things before they did them. Nowadays, people just go out and have sex with whoever they want and it doesn’t matter who you hurt or how many partners you’ve been with. Things have changed, which is why more and more woman are having children when they aren’t prepared to. The problems with sleeping around and having children is that some of the time, the mom or dad are not even ready for a child and are not financially stable enough to give that child three square meals a day and put clothes on their back, so that child may grow up with a more negative view toward the world. Even if the mom and dad are financially stable, in many occasions they do not stay together because it was just a one night or one week fling they had and it didn’t work out. So now the child is growing up with a split household and someone like myself coming from a split household, knows how rough and confusing that can be on a child. Another thing that has changed over the years is that kids are losing their virginity at a younger and younger age. Let’s say that a girl gets pregnant at age 15 and ends up wanting to keep the child. Her mind is not even close to being fully developed, nor is the father’s. With two underdeveloped minds that haven’t even seen begun to see the world, how will they be able to guide their child through life nearly as effectively as someone whose mind is developed? The reason I bring these points up to discussion is because they are all legitimate reasons why children nowadays are bullies, racist, and grow up pissed off toward the world and it is corrupting our society. And also a reason as to why people should be regulated as to who can have children and who cannot. In order for our country to change, we need to change something. People are taking advantage of Freedom and are running around wildly doing whatever it is that they please, and not fearing the consequences. Bullying is defined as the “systematic abuse of power” (Bullying, 2012). We all have power to do anything, but it is up to the parents to teach their kids how to use that power in a positive helpful way. Instead, they are filled with negative views and thoughts from their parents because their parents also hate the world, or they are being abused at home by those unfit parents. It really never seems to be the child’s fault; they learn from people around them, and the majority of the people they spend time with are their parents. From early childhood development, it is shown that insecure attachment toward your child is linked to bullying. That lack of insecurity can be carried out into relationships in school. A study was given to 856 adolescents as to describe the quality of family life and there were also questions as to who had been bullied and who had bullied other students. The results showed that family dysfunction was greater for the students who had bullied others. Many children who bully, say that their parents would not forgive them if they did something wrong, which brings us back to the type of parents they have. If a person had good parenting skills, they would be able to deal with whatever their child did, understand why they did it, and learn to forgive them. It is also known that if one or more parents are constructively involved in their child’s life, their child is less likely to bully. If the parents do not know or care where their child is, their child is also more prone to becoming a bully. More studies show that children with high self esteem are less vulnerable to bullying because their parents have raised them in a positive environment and have helped shaped them to be a good person and treat others well, as well as letting them know they are proud to be their parent. Parents who treat their child as if they are worthless or a burden can play a huge toll in the child’s mind and can lead to treating others the same way their parents treat them. (Bullying, 2012) These acts of childhood bullying brings us to the matter that if people were required to have a license to be a parent through simple background checks and tests, would children still grow up to act up and have negative views? The main reason that licensing exists in the world today is simple. According to Daniel B. Hogan, who wrote The Effectiveness of Licensing, “The primary purpose of licensing laws has been to protect the public health, morals, safety, and general welfare. Licensing attempts to accomplish this by eliminating quacks, charlatans, incompetents, and unethical practitioners from the field. This is done through strict entrance requirements, enforcing discipline, and preventing unlicensed practice.” This gives us a general reason as to why we should require people to earn a license before they are allowed to reproduce so we can reduce the amount of quacks, incompetent people, and unethical practitioners from passing down these habits to their youth. Licensure is a form of government control. The first known licensing was in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, the states passed a law to have physicians and surgeons be required to have a license in order to carry out their acts. (The Effectiveness of Licensing, p, 1-2) Which brings up another point. If a parent were to be paying attention to their child and caring for them and wanting them to have good morals and values, why let them play video games where there are prostitutes, shooting innocent people, and running from the police? I believe that these videogames have an impact of the child’s behavior and parent should not allow them to play these games. In one study, 430 third, fourth, and fifth graders were given the test to see if violent video games increase aggressive behavior, and they were given this test twice a year to. After playing the games, the results were kids who played more violent video games earlier in the school year, viewed the world to be more physically and verbally aggressive than the ones who played them later. Same with high school students. 189 of them were asked about violent videogames and the responded with the fact that they believed that it would heighten physical and violent behavior in the real world. (Grodzinski, 2011) Coming from someone that has played games like Grand Theft Auto, violent video games are terrible for children. Nothing at all good comes from them. Killing innocent people and beating women is not what we should be teaching our kids. For every idea, there is always more than one view. For Parental Licensing, there would be the view of the parents, from the children, and from the general public. For people who want to have children and were raised in good homes and believe they would give their kids the right care, they would be the ones to vote for the license. Other people would not want the government to interfere with the way that they parent because the way that they parent may be in a non-traditional way. The children who have been abused within their household by one or both of their parents would probably be the ones that are for the licensing because they know that in the future it will help more kids to not get abused. On the other hand, some children may not see the need for the parent licensing or maybe they will just say that because they want to protect their parents. Some people, like me, think that this licensing is a good idea because it will help on crime, on school bullying, on child abuse, and it would just sort of feel like we would be weeding out the people who are negative, hateful people in this world. As for other people, they love their freedom to the fullest amount and believe that people should be able to do whatever they want in their homes. Some facts about poor parenting linked to their children’s future violent behaviors are things like the kids who were abuse growing up and were neglected are 59% more likely to be arrested as a juvenile, 38% more likely to be arrested as an adult, and 30% more likely to commit a violent crime. Also, 36% of men and 14% of women were harmed as children by their parents. 70% of all child maltreatment cases involve some sort of substance abuse. (Should it be, 2015)