Should we license parents?

Time to separate parenting from marriage?

What are we going to do with the kids? Society seems to value kids, yet we aren’t doing much to help raise them well. It’s clear the efforts tomake divorce harderfor those couples with minor children isn’t going to work and who knows ifmaking marriage harderwould work either.

But maybe it isn’t about marriage at all. Maybe it’s about creating the best society in which to raise kids. And maybe we’re not doingthatright.

The New York Times highlighted some interesting parenting arrangements with its recent article,Making a Child, Minus the Couple.Gays and lesbians have been creating parenting partnerships for years, but recently, numerous social networks have sprung up to match prospective parent to prospective parent, hetero and/or gay “” a decidedly odd twist to online dating sites. Dating and love don’t factor into it at all, nor does sex. It’s all about those people who want to have a baby and want someone “”anyone“” to help them raise that baby.

But, where’s the love, you might be wondering?As some people have noted, trying to raise kids in a relationship based on love is problematic. After all, love comes and goes.

Is love between the parents even essential? Maybe not.

Certainly, from a research standpoint, I don’t think having a romantic relationship is necessary to have a good co-parenting relationship. Research shows that if parents can have a warm, cooperative, co-parenting relationship, then that’s going to be positive for the child’s development,” says Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, an associate professor in the Ohio State University department of human sciences.

Of course, most of us don’t think of raising a baby from a research standpoint.”

Others laud how parenting partnerships get people to focus on the realities of child-rearing early, way before junior is born. As Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of Family Equality Council, notes:

That level of thoughtfulness really benefits kids “” these are people who have thought about how do I want to raise a child, whom do I want to raise a child with “” that can only be good for children. We should all think that hard about how we are going to have our kids and what we’re going to do once they’re in the world. If everybody gave that kind of thought to having children, we’d probably have better outcomes.

Maybe we should legislate that kind of thoughtfulness. But more on that shortly.

It’s clear that as a society we’re becoming much more accepting of different ways in which to raise kids. Some40 percent of first babies born today are to single moms, many of whom are cohabiting. And fewer people say having children is a very important reason to get married,” a recentPew studyindicates.

So, do we even need to be married to have kids? No, according to Judith Stacey, sociology professor at New York University and author ofUnhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China.Marriage isnota universal, necessary, or intrinsically superior institution for sustaining children and families,” she says.

In fact, Stacey says our needs for both eros and domesticity are at often at odds.” Binding parenting to marriage makes a child’s well-being too vulnerable to Cupid’s antics.”

Instead, she advocates that:

A democratic society should encourage dignity, respect, and success for all of the honest, consensual, and responsible modes of living, loving, and caretaking to its citizens diverse. The state should be trying to ensure that citizens can freely enter and sustain supportive relationships and freely exit abusive ones. It has a legitimate interest in promoting responsible, committed care and protection forchildren and other dependents.

I don’t disagree with that, but that doesn’t answer an essential question:whoshould become parents “” everyone, or only those who can prove themselves able to fully take on the responsibilities, regardless if they’re married, single, divorced, gay, straight or polyamorous?