There are a lot of emotional competencies that people can learn through life.  All of the emotional competences people learn at school, work, or doing sports are portable to being a parent.  You just have to see being a caring and loving parent as being important enough to use those skills.

Part of being a good prospective parent is getting ahead of bad habits.  People are fantastically capable of creating bad habits and struggle greatly at forming new habits.  Often the motivation to improve comes tied together with a painful life lesson.  Unfortunately painful life lessons doesn’t remove someone’s bad habits.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure when it comes to not developing bad habits. The more you view the bad habits as potentially having a worsening domino affect the better off you will be as a parent.  You can’t be stressed out by having too much debt if you avoid bad spending habits.  You won’t have problems maintaining a relationship if you have  not had to much practice breaking up.