 |
| Jack Westman, author of Licensing Parents |
Licensing Parents is a book written by a professor of psychiatry named Jack Westman, which attempts to convince the reader that if the government required parents to be "licensed" before they were allowed to have children, it would result in fewer cases of child abuse and neglect. Exploring and analyzing the concepts put forth in this book are important as there are people in positions of power that take this book, and concept, seriously. One of those people is former judge for the Litchfield District Superior Court in Connecticut, Charles D. Gill. Gill wrote the foreword to Licensing Parents, and says that this was the book that convinced him that parents should be licensed. The influence of Judge Charles Gill in Connecticut law and politics was briefly explored in the article Parents Beware: The United Nations Looking To Give Children of Connecticut Special "Rights". This influence of Judge Gill deserves a more in-depth critical analysis, but for the sake of brevity, we will just focus on the concepts presented in Licensing Parents by it's author, Jack Westman.There is great deal of information presented in this nearly 300 page book, a lot of which is easy to agree with. For example, it does not take a trained psychiatrist to see that there are problems in society, and that many of the functions that are supposedly set up to fix these problems, are not working. Westman begins his book mentioning some of these issues such as "widespread crime", "the abduction of children", and an increase in suicide among teens. It is not so much Westman's diagnosis of society's problems that deserve scrutiny, but his radical solutions to these problems. Before exploring Westman's proposed solutions, though, it is important to understand what he believes to be the causes of societies ills.
