Parenting - an acquired skill?

In today's world, there is an entrance test or an interview that needs to be passed for most anything - from a toddler wanting to get into kindergarten...to a XII standard student looking for admission into tuition classes (yes, even those have entrance exams now!) ....to, of course, adults looking for jobs.

But, ironically, one adult job which does not require any such test, also happens to be one of the most important jobs that many of us do- Parenting.

Why doesn't nature require some mental/emotional readiness for becoming a parent, just like she demands physical readiness?

Parenting, it seems to me, is becoming quite a specialized skill, at least in certain societies. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that in earlier generations, parents did not have to be as conscious of their parenting skills as we do today, and sort-of raised children as a matter of course. However, today, there's so much analysis out there on what parents should do and not do with their children, that we tend to question ourselves frequently on the stance we take with our children on various things, how we interact with them, what we expose them to, etc. And, it is really difficult to measure how well we are doing, given that each child is a human being in their own right. Using the child's "success" or "failure" in life (assuming we can decide on how we measure that!) as a yardstick for deciding how well the parents did, doesn't seem like the right thing, since there are so many other factors that go into a child's development.

Like most skills, some folks are certainly more adept at parenting than others. In the film "Ijaazat", when Rekha starts managing Naseeruddin Shah's household from day one after their marriage, he makes a comment to the effect - "tum to ekdum professional housewife ho"! ("you are a professional housewife"!!). In my view, in a similar way, some folks are "professional parents". From day one, they are conscious of what they need to do as parents and do all things right for their child - food, clothes, school, habits, extra-curricular activities, etc.

However, the rest of us who are more like "amateur parents", who lack that in-built skill or training, try and learn on the job, with an evolving trial-and-error process. That's when one wishes that someone had made us take a 3-year course on parenting and made us pass an exam on the do's and dont's, before we took on the job.

On the other hand, the thought of special training in parenting sounds so ridiculous, when you think of the whole animal kingdom taking parenting in its stride, and following its natural instincts in raising its young!! Why has human parenting become much more of an acquired skill, rather than a natural instinct?!!

Edited to add: Shruthi's Law of Parenting in Shruthi's blog aptly expresses my thoughts too. I'd imagined that parenting would get easier as your babies got older, but it doesn't..... - it continues to evolve and change in degrees and you continue growing with your children, but I don't think it gets easier.