Everybody knows how bad the divorce rate is in this country. Books, movies, and television 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 knowing how to keep a child physically healthy for it grow is common sense (despite what the obesity epidemic would have us believe). However, it is hard because no one knows the perfect way to teach a child how to be a good, moral person. So many kids do not follow the right path these days — focusing on education, for example — 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 these types 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.
