Father's Day is tomorrow, and while I love my Dad, the whole concept of Father's Day--and Mother's Day too, kind of bothers me.
No doubt about it, parenting is hard work. I can barely handle being responsible for the lives of two felines, so I can't imagine the stress involved with being entirely responsible for another person. But here's the deal: there's no "Dog Keeper's Day" or "Cat Keeper's Day", not only because dogs and cats don't have a lot of disposable income to spend at "Keeper's Day" sales, but because pets are considered a lifestyle choice. But in this day and age, kids are a lifestyle choice as well.
Some might argue that we don't really need people to raise dogs and cats, but we need people to raise children. Once the child exists, it certainly needs caring for, but it's also true that once a cat or dog exists, society would prefer that they're adopted, rather than running around the streets. But while humans make a conscious choice to reproduce--there are few humans of reproductive age that don't understand where babies come from--dogs and cats are following a biological impulse
that they don't have the cognitive resources to override.
Others argue that society does indeed need children to support aging generations, and that
somebody must produce these children, positing parenthood as an altruistic endeavor. There is no doubt that reduced reproduction rates wreak havoc on the economies of industrialized societies. Japan, Italy and Australia (to name three off the top of my head) are all facing severe economic problems due to declining birth rates. Yet instead of opening up their labor market to foreign workers and offering incentives like expedited citizenship, these countries incentivize reproduction.
The irony of the situation is that measures like this mortgage the future of these very children in order to support today's economies: the child that is born to support today's economy without a thought as to what
that child's future will bring is an economic product not unlike livestock or grain. And we aren't thinking ahead. The planet can't support the ~6.5 billion people alive today, much less more. In Paul Simon's words, "the planet groans/ every time it registers/ another birth."
The "altruistic endeavor" of parenthood is never that. In industrialized societies, it's about making one's self happy--by having a plaything, a miniature self, a fashion accessory. This statement is not meant to minimize the love that parents feel for their children, nor the value of the child as a person.
But you ask people why they had children, and they never talk about the child
*, they talk how they imagined it would effect
their lives. Either that, or they admit that they didn't think about it at all, which is somehow worse. Just as ignorance of the law can't be claimed as a defense, "I didn't really think about it" can't be claimed as a reason for having kids.
In developing societies, people often have children for personal economic stability. While on the individual level, this seems to be more a necessity than a choice, increasing population for personal economic stability suffers from the same problem that increasing population for national economic stability does: as economic resources go, population is a pyramid scheme. In order to get a decent cut there have to be more people below you than next to you. And while this was a manageable paradigm three billion people ago, when one kid could farm one acre, and two kids could farm three acres and five kids could farm fifteen acres, today there aren't fifteen acres to be had, and now there are five kids trying to support their families on an acre or two.
Which brings us to the "why me?" Why should it be
me that forgoes what
I want, when the rest of the world isn't? If an Indian farmer is going to have six kids, why can't
I have one?
(Never mind that your one American kid will likely consume 1.41 times
** more resources than the five Indian kids
put together.) Why shouldn't
I have someone to care for
me when I'm old? (Consider how well you take care of your parents, then consider all the money you could save if you didn't have kids, and what a nice,
caring retirement community you could live in with all that cash.) What if
my kid grows up to solve AIDS and global warming, or be the next Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi? (What if your kid grows up to be the next Thabo Mbeki or George W. Bush? Or Kim Il Sung or Mohammed Suharto? There are a lot more ways that a kid can go wrong than there are ways a kid can go right.)
So, why you? And why
me? Because sometimes you have to do what is right
because it is right not because it is easy or popular. Because
not having that kid may not seem to contribute much to the solution, but
having that kid will certainly contribute to the problem. Besides, if you really feel that you have so much to offer a child, or feel that the only way you could be happy is caring for a child, there are plenty of unwanted children (and here I mean children, not infants) that need to be cared for.
I, of course, have family and friends that have recently had children. I don't stop loving them, even though I don't have a lot of respect for their decision to have children. While I find most children supremely annoying--that's kind of the nature of being a kid (especially when you mix in a dose of inadequate parenting)--I have, in the past, found myself enjoying other peoples' children. I'm sure that if someday I find myself on the traumatic side of a birth control failure (a 1% failure rate seems pretty small until you're
in that 1%) I would love that child. And, no, I haven't forgotten that I was once a kid myself, and I required just as much parenting as any other kid. Which is how this article got started in the first place, with me thinking about Father's Day. I love my parents, and I respect them, and I have no real problem reserving one day a year to tell them this. But maybe we should also reserve a day each year to honor the children, who, without any say in the matter were dragged into the world as someone else's "lifestyle choice."
*Once the child is born, they will talk about how wonderful the child is and how wonderful being a parent is for as long as you let them. And while it's great that Tina made the waitress at Bob Evans laugh by singing to her chicken nuggets, unless they say, "we felt the world would be a better place if we had a kid, because that kid would make waitresses laugh by singing to food," that's not a reason for having a kid.
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**Data from
The Epoch Times. "It is often stated that the United States consumes about 25 percent of world's resources while only making up 4.5% of the world's population." That means an American percent of population consumes 5.56% of the world's resources, and a non-American percent consumes 0.785% of the world's resources. Five non-American percent consumes 3.93% of the world's resources, or 70.6% of what one American does. Or, the American consumes 141% of what the non-American does.
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