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Parents May Not Be Licensed Essay

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In the essay Licensing Parents, LaFollette argues that the state should require all parents to be licensed (182). Though LaFollette considers some theoretical and practical objections to his claim, he gives no particular attention to how an activity could be precisely defined as potentially harmful to others, what specific competence would be required for an activity to be done safely, and how reliably such competence could be determined. In this paper, I will argue that the difficulty of clearly defining the three criteria for an activity to be licensed undermines LaFollette’s assertion that parenting ought to be licensed. After describing LaFollette’s basic rationale for licensing parents, I will indicate that parenting may not meet the …show more content…

Consequently, because “parenting is an activity potentially very harmful to children” (184) and “a parent must be competent if he is to avoid harming his children” (185), LaFollette concludes that the general criteria for regulatory licensing can be applied to parents. However, there are several theoretical and practical objections to LaFollette’s proposal, but he argues that they all fail to undermine the proposal. In the beginning of his argument, LaFollette claims that parenting is an activity potentially very harmful to children (184). However, LaFollette does not explicitly justify how parenting could be precisely defined as potentially harmful to children. In other words, LaFollette does not explicitly establish what comprises exactly the minimum amount of harm that makes the activity potentially harmful or very harmful. Instead, LaFollette only offers two scenarios in which children are harmed—abused or neglected—by their parents (184). In this paragraph, I shall argue that, without a precise

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