You need a license to drive a car. You need a permit to own a dog. But you can have as many children as you like, with the only limiting factor your reproductive capacity.

This is problematic, because good parenting skills are not always intuitive.

As a resourceful Harvard undergraduate, if someone handed me a newborn child and sent me home, I wouldn’t have the slightest clue what to do. Though I’m sure I would eventually figure out how to feed and burp the child, as well as rock him or her to sleep, the goals of fostering good behavioral habits along with quality intellectual development would probably be lost somewhere between the baby crying and me trying to make dinner while finishing my homework. Good parenting is not an innate trait, and is even less so under stressful situations.

In a more relaxed situation, I’d presumably have nine months to learn the ins and outs of childcare, but many unplanned pregnancies—and 49 percent of pregnancies are unplanned, according to studies cited by the Centers for Disease Control—result in something more akin to a Five-Month Panic; once the child is born, there’s no time to catch up on parenting tips.

I spent the summer working for The Family Van, a healthcare center on wheels serving Boston’s under-served in Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury. Day after day, men and women would climb in and out of the van for various tests and counseling. One of our mandatory questions, “How many children do you care for under the age of 18?”, would reveal young parents with a gaggle of children; a pregnancy test would reveal another on the way. These men and women were stressed out from the double whammy of poverty and parenthood, unable to understand why they couldn’t control the children wreaking havoc a few feet away—or, even better, “spending the day at home.” Children under the age of nine, spending eight hours a day home alone?

One particularly memorable woman, a 30-year-old mother of one, had yet to register her seven-year-old for school as of the day before classes. Both she and her son were very calm and loving, but the boy didn’t yet know his alphabet. In seven years of life, no one had ever sat down to read with him. This docile boy was quite possibly the most under-stimulated child in all of Boston. I wanted to say, “Hey, you need to read to your kid. He’s smart, but just because he behaves doesn’t mean he’s okay.” Nothing. She just didn’t get it. Every politician out there runs campaigns on the platform of correcting our public education system, but is it really fair to expect the burden to fall on first-grade teachers?

Unfortunately, such problems are not limited to poor urban neighborhoods—they are just more noticeable there. A lack of childhood stimulation, like most other social problems, is cyclical in nature. How would a parent understand the importance of books if books were not emphasized in his or her own childhood? How is any stressed parent, struggling to make ends meet, supposed to know that giving in to tantrums is only a temporary fix, and that they should take the opportunity lay down boundaries?

As my months on the Family Van demonstrated, lack of love is rarely the problem; it’s usually lack of education. Parents love their children and desperately want them to be successful. In the meantime, the pressures of day-to-day life are so frustrating, particularly in poor areas, that many children slip through the cracks into endless hours of T.V. babysitting, unhealthy eating habits, regular hooky from school and perpetually late bedtimes. To parents, children engaged in mindless activity don’t seem neglected, because at least the children are “occupied.” But really, by the time they reach grade school, their under-stimulation has given them a limited to non-existent interest in learning. What kinds of adults will these children become?

To help curb the confused mess of parental ideals into which children are born, the government needs to start offering optional parenting classes, with tax write-offs or health insurance deductions as an incentive. The earlier parents take them the better; courses during pregnancy could qualify for a hospital bill deduction.

The incentive system for these classes could resemble those for driving courses. Every few years, I take a six-hour driving course to save a few hundred dollars on my driving insurance. Twenty others and I take a day to talk about car maintenance, as well as current road conditions and construction in the region. Admittedly, if the course didn’t come with an insurance incentive, I wouldn’t take it, because I’m not too concerned with the ways of anti-lock brakes.

But if I had children, I would be concerned about their well-being. Very concerned. And there isn’t a similar, easily accessible parenting course to take, a friendly place where an expert could talk about feeding and nutrition, local school district reputations and childcare program opportunities. As a society, we’re placing more bureaucratic emphasis on car maintenance than on child maintenance, and it’s coming back at us with a bite.

Arianne R. Cohen ’03, a Crimson editor, is a government concentrator in Leverett House.