Should schools teach children how to be good parents?

In recent years many people have suggested that schools should have lessons about how to be a good parent. I agree with this idea, because unfortunately there are many bad parents in the world today.

Firstly, we can see every day that some parents do not know how to raise their children properly. They shout at them, they leave them alone in front of a screen for hours, and some of them do not even give them a healthy meal. These children grow up with problems and later they become bad parents themselves, so the circle continues from generation to generation. If these people had studied parenting at school, our society would be much healthier.

Secondly, being a parent is the most important job in the world, and it is strange that we need a licence to drive a car but anybody can have a baby without any preparation at all. At school we learn mathematics and history, but nobody teaches us how to feed a baby, how to talk to a teenager or how to control our anger, although these are the skills we will really need in our life. In my opinion a short course in the last year of school, taught by a doctor or a psychologist rather than by a normal teacher, would prepare young people much better than another year of geometry.

In conclusion, I strongly agree that parenting should be taught at school, because too many parents today are simply not doing their job well and their children are the ones who suffer.

The useful question is not whether parenting matters — obviously it does — but whether it is the kind of thing a school can teach. I agree that it partly is, and that the curriculum should say so; but the agreement has to be narrowed to the content a lesson can actually carry, because most of what makes someone a good parent is not teachable in a classroom.

A great deal of parenting is information, and information is precisely what schools are for. Infant feeding, safe sleep, what developmental stages look like so a parent is not alarmed by ordinary behaviour, the sheer financial arithmetic of a child, and the mechanics of sleep deprivation — these are facts, they are widely misunderstood, and a fifteen-year-old could learn them in a term. The public health case is straightforward: several of these facts prevent deaths, and currently they are transmitted by whichever relative happens to be nearby.

What cannot be delivered this way is the harder half. Patience under exhaustion, tolerance of a child who is nothing like you, the capacity not to repeat what was done to you — these are dispositions formed over years, mostly by having been parented well, and a Tuesday lesson will not install them. The honest objection to this proposal is not that it intrudes on families but that it may overpromise, and a course that implies competence has been conferred could leave people less prepared than an honest warning would.

So teach it, and be precise about which half is being taught. Call it child development and infant health, deliver it in the final years of school when the audience is close enough to care, and say plainly that the rest is learned on the job like everything else that matters.