Should There Be a License to Become a Parent free essay sample

I was skimming through a newspaper recently when I came across a really bizarre news article. The article was about a Pakistani man having 23 wives and 93 kids! This man aims to complete a century of children by 2013, with the hope of getting his name in the Guinness Book of World Record. He is a resident of Dubai and the government of UAE is supporting him and his largely extended family with 60 thousand dirhams per month. Isn’t this really absurd? This man named Abdur Rehman does not even know the name of all his children nor does he know which child is from which of his wives. Do you think a man having such a vast family is able to even bring up his children properly? The sole objective of bringing them into this world is just for the sake of a â€Å"World Record†, what happens to them after they are born, bears no importance at all. This is just one example of the many careless and inconsiderate parents in our society. The idea of having a license to become a parent might sound totally ridiculous to most of you, but the brutality prevailing in our society even in parents, since about a decade or two has forced me to believe that we are in a dire need of this. Closing our eyes towards the facts doesn’t change them, it actually makes them worse. We require education and testing to qualify for a license to drive a car, shoot a gun, fly a plane, catch a fish, or operate a ham radio. Yet, most people give very little forethought to parenthood, and are given very little, if any, training for one of life’s most demanding and important jobs. According to a UNICEF report (2004) approximately 40% of the total child population under the age of 5 years suffered malnutrition, 63% between 6 months to 3 years stunted growth, anemic and underweight and infant mortality rate is 81%. Poor conditions extend to the education sector too, 23 million children in Pakistan had never been to school and 21% were the victim of child marriages. . Each year, roughly estimated, about 50,000 children with observable injuries severe enough to require hospitalization are not even reported and an estimated 8 million children under age of 15 years out of 30 million of country’s population of this age are involved in child labor. The majority of Pakistani population resides in the rural areas where poverty and lack or education forces them to use their children as an earning fuel for their families, as if these little souls were given to them by God for this very reason. These people have dozens of children with food for not even a single member of the family. This is not only restricted to rural areas, the lower class in the urban areas has been brought to the condition where they sell their children in order to earn livelihood for them. Muhammad Ahsan, a poor resident of Lahore gave his son away to his employer, a brick-kiln owner, after failing to pay back money he had earlier borrowed, but feels embarrassed that the boy has ended up working as a domestic helper in the latter’s home in Lahore. In the southern Punjab town of Vehari, Ghazala Bibi, once stood at a city square for over seven hours, seeking â€Å"buyers† for  her three children. â€Å"My husband is a drug addict and I can no longer manage to feed my children,† Ghazala, a domestic worker, said. This is the story of almost every lower class family in rural and urban areas of Pakistan, yet the idea of having proper finance and parenting training before having children seems â€Å"Un-Islamic† to the majority. I ask you, where does this religion go when people are selling their children on the streets? Where does it go when they are killing their own children because they are no longer able to feed them? Where does it go when their children are forced to beg on the streets for a single meal of the day? We claim to be Muslims yet we are doing what the pre-Islamic Arabs used to do i. e. urying their children alive? Has God given us these beautiful little souls for this day, that we kill them when we find out we are not able to feed them? Won’t it be much better if this decision is taken before bringing these souls into this world? If a couple does not have enough food and money to feed themselves, how can you expect them to feed and clothe their child when he is bor n? Well then again, people argue that the child brings his â€Å"rizq† with him. Where does this concept go when they are killing and selling their children? The Western countries are no exception in this case. A chilling national poll of U. S. children ages 3 through 12 estimated that nearly 75 million youngsters suffer both physical and psychological abuse at the hands of their parents on a daily basis. In Los Angeles, a woman killed her daughter because the child was irritating her while watching television. Ironically, a television program bears more importance than a child’s life. Being a single parent is a common practice in the western countries. These single parents then throw their children in day care centres because they fail to look after them. Shouldn’t this be regulated by the State? In a brutal world like this I strictly believe that licensing and training is crucial. The question is that who would decide this licensing procedure. What I suggest is that parenting training and education should be provided to everyone in the state. People must also be psychologically tested as most of them end up abusing their children due to not being in the right state of mind. Parents must be made aware of the need to educate and train their children properly and strict punishments must be enforced on those infringing the laws.