Why do so Many People Have Children?
By Josh Glazer
Everybody knows how bad the divorce
rate is in this country. Books, movies,
and TV are filled with stories about how tough having kids and being married
can be. Yet many people willingly plan
their lives around having a family. Is
that all there is to the meaning to life?
Having children?
Raising a
human child to adulthood can be both the easiest, and hardest, job out
there. It is easy, because you don’t have
to do anything besides keep the child healthy for it to physically grow. It is hard, because no one knows the perfect
way to teach a child how to be a good person.
So many kids do not follow the right path these days (i.e. focus on
education) and there is no agreed upon method of “How?” to make a child be a
decent person.
The work of
raising a child is enough for a full time job, and then some. A child, while they are growing up, needs a
great deal of love and attention, especially because public school can be very traumatic
to a young child’s self esteem. I mean,
to honestly think that a young person will be well molded by the common system is just about
ludicrous. I believe it is the same as
tossing a child into water in the belief they will “figure out” how to
swim.
People should seriously spend their
time learning about themselves and the world before deciding to settle down and
have children. I used to joke that there
should be a law that “no one is allowed to get married until age 30”, but now I
think that the issue of when to settle down and have children goes beyond age
limitations. As human beings, we have
the ability to stifle our immediate biological needs for other goals that we
believe are more important. For example,
we might go for a day without sleeping in order to cram for an exam, or skip a
meal so we could hear an important lecture.
Why should our need to procreate be any different? Our biological desire to have children should
be trumped by our human desire, which is a result of our free will and our
intelligent awareness, to better ourselves and our world. We must find a way to rise above material
concerns and the pressures of society to define our own most desired objectives
in life.
Is the
meaning of life simply to procreate? I
cannot believe so, since humans have risen so far above simple biological
concerns. I think that the most important
thing is to truly find one’s self first.
The focus of each person’s life should be on self-realization, before
anything else.
