Child-Free? Why?
Ultimate Reason for Consideration of Being Child-Free
Though there are still many people who hold the traditional view of having kids as mandatory, however, nowadays, more people start choosing for being child-free.
There are many reasons for having kids such as ‘kids are a gift from God’, ‘kids are cute!’, ‘this life isn’t complete without the experience of becoming a parent’, ‘to carry on the family name and values’, ‘because of biology’ or so-called ‘it’s human nature’ and a whole lot of other purposes of having kids that we can find from anywhere or we can even make up a list of our own as long as we wanted to for example, ‘because all of our friends have kids!’ or ‘ because our parents want a grandchild!’. And the silliest one, in my opinion, is…
“To have someone to take care of us when we get old.”
OH… MY…. DAMN…. GOD!!
I’m shaking my head while typing and rereading that last idea of the reason for having kids. Come on… kids will grow and have to live their lives and take care of their own business, too, like anybody else.
I’m by no means to encourage people for choosing to not have kids since everyone is free and can choose what they want when they can. I added ‘when they can’ because we know that sometimes the situation and condition just didn’t support us along the way.
So, what I’m trying to do here is to list down some of the reasons for us to consider before we decided to have kids or not to have kids when we have the choice.
Here we go,
1. Education
As a parent, ones need to have basic knowledge of how to live as a human being, for example, one of the easy rules is ‘if you don’t like being bitten, then don’t bite’. This idiom lets us learn how to position ourselves in another person's shoes which results in respecting another fellow human or any other living being.
Do we want to bring up our kids and let them live a life like a scumbag asshole destroying things around them, including themselves, physically or mentally later on?. I’m sure that I do not want that kind of thing to happen.
Another basic lesson we’ll also need to teach our kids from early on is how to protect themselves by avoiding strangers getting too close to them especially when they are alone. Girls or boys. They are all vulnerable to sexual assault. This is to protect them for the long run because kids absorb lessons deeply at their early age since their minds are still pure. Any person who deals with sexual assault or abuse early on in their life will live in trauma and it took a lot for them to deal with their mental health later in their adult life. The worst part? people who should have protected those kids somehow was the one that took advantage and sexual assault them.
I bring this topic on especially because I, myself, experienced being molested inside a bus when I was around preteen. My mom was sitting beside the window seat, and I sat near the bus door, about a one-meter distance from her, because I enjoyed sitting there watching the scene passing through the bus door and feeling the air. The bus conductor sat right closed behind me while the driver is driving. It’s only four of us on the bus. All of a sudden, I felt a sensation I had never known before. The second I realize the sensation was strange, I looked up around and found his eyes looking into mine for seconds. I look into his eyes full of questions until I saw he put his finger down.
Thanks God, he stopped right there and no further horror happened on that occasion. This one experience taught me to be cautious towards strangers, especially men, and to keep my distance, for the rest of my life. However, it didn’t teach me to keep my distance from someone whom I trusted and regarded as my own brother which led me to almost being raped by him in my early twenties. A father and a husband of someone close to my family. This story was a brief example and not only for women because I know some men heading 40, still deal with the trauma from their early ages because of being raped.
Damn you human beings but didn’t learn how to be a human and bring all the negativity to other human beings to deal with in their whole life.
Next, another kind of education is the one that kids need to get from school, it’s varied in all kinds of lessons. I don’t need to list them down here. These kinds of education bring us to the next reason for us to consider if we want to have kids or not, which is, ‘finance’.
2. Finance
Okay, some may have the privilege to get a good and free education from the school where they live but not every free choice had the quality. Sometimes we need to pay to get the quality which could help these kids grow better and to help them walk their path easier later on in their adult life when they can have more choice on their career path in their life based on what they have learned in school. This will also help them to be able to support themselves financially later on after their parents stop funding them.
Oh, also, we need to make sure their stomach is filled enough so that they have the energy required to keep learning what’s important to them. People can’t learn optimally when they were starving. And those meals take money. Please considered our financial situation when we want to have kids.
Of course, this particular reason doesn’t apply to those who are financially secured but… here’s my last but not least ultimate reason,
3. Life’s Tough
One of the people who promote ‘life is easy’ which I found on google was Jon Jandai (http://www.jon-jandai.com/). I do agree with his thought because everything in this life is two-sided based on what kind of perspective we used. Everyone in this life will encounter a life lesson on their way mostly, mentally. Those who have enough resiliency will keep going on.
Take Jon Jandai as an example, some of us can enjoy and be grateful for what we have in this life and make good tools of them to enrich our life journey. That’s when finally life starts to feel a little bit easier.
But how many of us can be like this man…?
When faced with difficulty at some point in our life, some of us had a hard time overcoming those life lessons. There are numerous people who are stuck, can not move on and choose to end everything. Right there.
Type a keyword of ‘suicide cases’ on google. Google will show us the rates of the cases and also other information about that. Most often than not, we’ll find several famous people which are financially stable end up suicide.
What’s happened..? why do they end up killing themselves? Have we dug deep enough about this life so we can create a better future for the next generation, especially for our (future) kids, if we want to bring them into this world…?
One challenge for future generations ahead that I believe going to grow is the challenge of mental health. It’s already happening now due to the new way of our social life nowadays which is full of virtual connections adding to the lack of parents’ love and time for their kids.
Final Thought
Becoming a parent took incredible responsibility. We need to prepare these kids with some basic knowledge to face the journey called life. It will be better if we are life learners ourselves and have the confidence to bring up our future kids for being able to face and go through those difficult phases that will happen in their life later on, physically or mentally. I believe we don’t want to see our lovely kids struggling and couldn’t move on with each difficulty that they will encounter in their life since it’s gonna be heartbreaking!
Finally! Let me share some good news!
Although this world is full of negativity, the same goes for positivity.
What we need is to learn how to utilize those positivities and cultivated them in our life which can help everyone walk the journey easier and then pass this knowledge to those future children ‘if’ we choose to have one or more.
If we are looking for happiness and want to fulfil our life, I believe making our own kids wasn’t mandatory. It’s a personal choice. There are still plenty of other things that we can do and experience to enrich our lives and others. And there are also lots of kids who need parents in orphanages if someone wants to have kids.
Have you made your choice…?
