May I see your permit to parent, please?

Imagine that you've met the man of your dreams. You want to have his children.

Imagine, however, the paralysing self-doubt that paradoxically accompanies such romantic certitude: Will he still love me tomorrow? How many children should we have? Will he make a good father?

At this point, in my fantasy world, said Man of Your Dreams will pull out a laminated piece of plastic. "I have a licence," he would say in his deep, hypnotic baritone. "A licence to breed."

Most of us, at some point or another, have questioned the fitness of certain individuals to parent: The mother who gives her toddler fast food for lunch five days a week; the father shouting profanities at his hysterical son in public; the couple of drug addicts who get high while their baby is in the next room.

This month, Americans are weighing in on the case of National Football League star Adrian Peterson, in which he is being investigated for child abuse after whipping his 11-year-old son with a tree branch.

So when a friend recently posted on Facebook a Wired magazine article about licensing parents, it gave me pause - and opened up new perspectives.

In that Aug 14 article headlined "It's time to reconsider restricting human breeding", American writer Zoltan Istvan argued that, given radical science and technological advances in the near future, such as a birth-control microchip that lasts 16 years, and to prevent the suffering of tens of thousands of starving, abused and trafficked children in the world, it made sense to allow only suitable, responsible candidates to have kids.

"After all, we don't allow people to drive cars on crack cocaine," wrote Istvan. "Why would we allow them to procreate if they want while on it?

"The goal with licensing parents is not so much to restrict freedoms, but to guarantee the maximum resources to those children who exist and will exist in the future."

On the surface, it is tempting to agree with Istvan. Way back in 1994, American psychiatry professor Jack C. Westman noted in a column in the Chicago Tribune that "about 4 per cent of parents from all socioeconomic classes are incompetent" - and that many neglected or abused children became dangerous or dependent adults who "drain public funds and erode the productivity of our workforce".

In The Rationale And Feasibility Of Licensing Parents (1996, read it on www.pbs.org), Dr Westman wrote: "We need a new paradigm in which parenthood is a privilege, as it is now for adoptive and foster parents, rather than a biological right."

What Dr Westman - and Istvan - glossed over, however, was the difficulty of executing such a scheme: Who exactly is qualified or impartial enough to sort all would-be parents into Competent and Incompetent classes? What kind of questions do you put on a Parent Licence theory test? Who decides which parenting sins get your licence revoked?

Already, moral dilemmas worthy of a thousand Jodi Picoult novels are mushrooming in my mind: What if the state deems a person too stupid, mentally unstable or disabled to have a child? Where do we draw the line between cold pragmatism and outright colonial- or Nazi-era discrimination?

Not to push too fine a point about civil liberties, then, but you can understand what a colossal headache the whole card-carrying mum and dad policy would be.

Besides, the Western intellectuals who are for such a "solution" to incompetent parenting miss a giant roadblock in many developed countries: Carrots, cash and tax breaks have to be dangled in front of many married couples before they would even have kids. Ask them to sit for a licence exam? Forget it.

Then, there's the thing about how human beings are capricious and unpredictable. If one needed to apply for a licence to become a parent in Singapore, I would never have been given one, I think.

Before I discovered I was pregnant, about nine years ago, I was the co- mortgagee of my parents' house that we could no longer afford (read: a financial risk), working irregular hours (potential absentee parent), partying most nights (flighty) and had an anger management problem (still working on it).

I was in a relationship with a man who had, years ago, written a personal column in a now-defunct local newspaper about why he didn't want to have kids.

Yet, motherhood changed me - changed us - profoundly, and in ways nobody could have imagined, much less a bureaucrat administering any parenting aptitude test.

So, instead of parenting licenses, we should have a voluntary parenting accreditation scheme. Sort of like the one recently announced for pre-schools with best practices.

Those of us who so desire could go out and get certified by the relevant bodies as bona fide parents, just to satisfy ourselves that we're doing something right. We could compare our licence mugshots at playdates.

It could even become a symbol of quality, produced on blind dates to impress the other party. Just remember, however, that if you pull it out and wave it in the face of the Ah Beng Bad Father at the playground, it might just earn judgmental li'l you a black eye.

This article was first published on Sep 28, 2014.
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