DAVID LYKKEN is a behavioral geneticist and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Happiness.
I believe that during my grandchildren’s lifetimes the U.S. Supreme Court will find a way to approve laws requiring parental licensure.
Traditional societies in which children are socialized collectively, the method to which our species is evolutionarily adapted, have very little crime. In the modern United States, the proportion of fatherless children, living with unmarried mothers, currently some 10 million, has increased more than 400 percent since 1960, while the violent crime rate had risen to 500 percent by 1994 before dipping slightly (due to an increase in the number of prison inmates). In 1990, across the fifty states, the correlation between the violent crime rate and the proportion of illegitimate births was 0.70.
About 70 percent of incarcerated delinquents, teenage pregnancies, adolescent runaways involve (I think result from) fatherless rearing. Because these frightening curves continue to accelerate, I believe we must eventually confront the need for parental licensure—you can’t keep that newborn unless you are twenty-one, married, and self-supporting—not just for society’s safety but so those babies will have a chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.