There is mounting evidence traditional social ties are breaking down. One of the benefits these social ties gives was inter generational transfers of information and skills---your mother showed you how to hold the baby's head, feed and bathe the baby, and so on. One worrying trend, perhaps due in part to this breakdown of ties, is the rise of parents with little or no parenting skills. One way to address a lack of parental training is a mandatory government-sponsored course of parenting skills.

Imagine the following scenario: you fall pregnant, and go to your GP. They refer you to a parenting course (examples here and here) run at a convenient time, and automatically enroll you. The course is not mandatory, however. If you sign up to the course and pass it, you qualify for an increased children's' allowance significantly above the rate enjoyed by other new parents who decide not take the course. It is still your choice whether or not to learn. The government has not forced you to choose to learn how to become a better parent, but once the incentive is great enough, so the thinking goes, in general, people will decide to take the course. As long as the course is well designed and run, the social benefits of a well-informed cohort of parents will outweigh the costs of running the program.

The idea behind this policy isn't mine---it comes from behavioural economics. Championed by University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler, (and legal scholar Cass Sunstein), who proselytises his thinking in a new book, Nudge. Behavioural economics discards the economists' traditional assumptions about people being super rational calculators, and focuses more on their flaws to create policies which affect people's behaviour without also creating more centralised bureacracy. Thaler argues people don't compute their optimal level of happiness at every moment. For the most part, people do what they did yesterday. And this creates conditions where people make mistakes. Mistakes like not finding out how to be better parents.

Group parent training programs already exist in pilot programs in North Dublin run, in one instance, by the Northside Partnership with their Parenting for Life programme, and have been shown to be beneficial in several international studies. Parents learn 'life skills', coping mechanisms, and nutrition., amongst other things As a father of two, if I had known these courses existed, I would be first in line to sign up. All I did was read six books and confuse myself.

What about the draconian effects of this proposed policy? Aren't I really just giving the illusion of choice rather than an actual one, using Thaler's Nudge idea? Isn't this idea just traditional state paternalism rebranded using some psychological tricks? Not really, because if someone has a strong aversion to the parenting course, say on religious or ethical grounds, then they have a measure of the strength of that conviction---the income foregone in the making of the choice. More realistic policy options can also be constructed: we could offer several tiered children's allowance options, one without the course, one with the course, and so on, where increases are passed on incrementally. People might argue this will put pressure on the poorer segments of society to take the course, but as lower levels of education are strongly correlated with lower incomes, perhaps this is may be a benefit rather than a cost of the program.

We need to have a debate about what constitutes good parenting: what skills, tools, and tips do we as a society think every parent needs to have in their possession to give their children the best chance possible? Once we have such a list, then we need a delivery mechanism for this information. We could do worse than asking every parent to learn a little about parenting before becoming one.