Fitness for Parenthood. Even the minimum qualifications for parenthood are various. For the fullest welfare of the child the following qualifications are essential:
Spiritual: a sense of the responsibility of parenthood, love of children; love of harmony and mutual agreement between parents; self-control, unselfishness, patience.
Social: legal marriage, good moral character.
Economic: marketable skill, energy, adaptability; ability of father to earn a comfortable living, potential ability of mother to earn a living, ability to use income economically.
Mental: Maturity, experience, judgment to conduct one’s share of the family and household responsibility, ability to learn; for the mother, knowledge of at least the elements of hygiene, child-care and training, some experience in caring for little children.
Physical: physical and mental soundness; sound heredity, especially freedom from neuropathic taint, alcoholism, tuberculosis, venereal disease (syphilis or gonorrhea); freedom from poisons of alcohol, fatigue, worry, overwork; mother not less than twenty or more than forty-five; father not less than twenty, preferably past twenty-four; maximum vitality and physical energy.
Blood tests recently discovered make possible the diagnosis of tuberculosis and venereal disease in the system, even when no symptoms are obvious. It is estimated that about twenty to thirty per cent. of cases of venereal disease are innocently acquired, through public drinking cups, towels, lavatories, toilets, or by infection of the husband or wife after marriage. Infection is usually acquired through sex immorality. The certainty of a cure can never be made absolute; the probability requires years of persistent treatment by a responsible physician, not a quack. The man who has “sown his wild oats” has verily sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, and is most liable to have acquired one of these loathsome diseases, habits of drinking, and of self-indulgence. It is dangerous to his wife and children for him to become a father until all of these have been overcome. A woman who contemplates marrying such a man to reform him is inviting disease and destruction upon herself and her children.
Some individuals should never become parents because they carry so serious an hereditary taint which some of their children would probably inherit and carry on. This includes individuals afflicted with the following:
Neuropathic taint: feeble-mindedness, idiocy, insanity, mania, epilepsy, hysteria, chorea, sex perversion, alcoholism
Syphilis