I'm not a kid person. Maybe I'll mellow as I get older & one day have a family, but It bothers me to no end when I go to dinner & get seated next to a table with a bunch of kids. Invariably, one of the kids will start screaming at the top of their lungs or start running around the restaurant, and the parent(s) will just sit there. Of course you know the rest of us in the restaurant just love paying $40 to listen to kids scream while we eat. This is the reason businesses & restaurants are moving toward "Child Free Zones".
But what about the more disfunctional families? People have thrown around the idea of licensing people if they want families. The story below made me think of it when I read it. On the surface it seems absurd & authoritarian, but look at the bigger context...
We require
licenses &
permits for people to...
- Drive a car.
- Serve alcohol at an establishment.
- Be a hair dresser at a salon.
- Hunt deer or fish.
- Remodel their homes.
- Get married.
- Operate a day care for children.
...We do that because of societal needs for safety. However, a 16 year old on crystal meth can pop out children, and be expected to raise them.
That's what is really upsetting. When you see people who have no business having children. The 19 year old couple that had to skip college to have 3 kids, and living pay day to pay day to support them, or the young women who come on Maury to find their baby's father. The women & men are more often than not poor & uneducated. The kids in these situations are starting out with "2 strikes" against them. Disfunction breeding disfunction in a descending spiral.
That's not to say there can't be love or the children in these situations can't rise out of it, but they're starting in a bad position. Take this case for example...
According to the good people at The Smoking Gun, the picture above is of 22 year old Tiffany Eagle (left) and her friend, 21 year old Ashley Tomaszewski...
...The two Indiana women went to Kokomo's Big Daddy's strip club early Sunday morning and proceeded to drink until they were plastered. While that's not a crime, the fact that the gals had left the 22-year-old Eagle's newborn son in an unheated car outside the topless joint is where the alleged felonious behavior comes in. According to a Kokomo Police Department report, the three-month-old baby (who was wearing a sleeper) was lying face down in the back seat of Tomaszewski's 1996 Oldsmobile. Cops reported the temperature outside at about 32 degrees at 3 AM, when they were called to the scene after a bar patron spotted the unattended baby, who was later examined at a local hospital and appeared unharmed. When interviewed by cops, Eagle claimed that she had left her son with a sitter, and that Tomaszewski, 21, had transported the child to the club. For her part, Tomaszewski, who blew a .28 on a Breathalyzer test, accepted no responsibility for the infant.
Now, do you really think someone like this should be having children?
The hard part & what probably makes licensing unfeasible, is what would be the consequences of someone "illegaly" having children? Would you lock them up? What would that do? Also, look at people with Driver's licenses. Half the people who are licensed to drive on the road have no business doing it. So just because we licensed people to have children, it wouldn't mean they would be good parents...