Last weekend I caught up with a few old friends at my brother’s wedding, and most of them asked the typical questions. How’s the job? How’s the house? How’s the kid?
But one friend caught me off guard with a very good question.
He asked me, “Why should people have kids? Why would I bring a child into this world?”
You may have come across this question before. I certainly have. It was at this time, however, that I realized that I had a very concrete answer, and one that I had yet to voice or write.
What I said was that not wanting to have a child, because the world is not the way we would like it to be, is actually a paradox. The world IS the next generation. The reason why the youth of our age feel so nihilistic and disenfranchised, is because they cannot envision building a world for the next generation. They are only thinking about themselves. It is precisely through children that we can enact the change we wish to see in this world. It is the only world building tool that every human being has at their disposal. If we are motivated to protect our children, and to instill in them the positive values that we wish to see, then that will become the world they live in.
The following day he told me that he had never heard such a perspective, and that surprisingly, he was starting to feel a little differently about having children himself.