A Better Idea

We don't have a drug problem or problems of vandalism or run-a-ways, or latch keys or mall mice or uneducated products of our expensive education systems. We have a major problem of children: unwanted, unnecessary, unmotivated and useless children, babies who pass through dozens of frustrating stages before reaching human-hood.
Just look at them! We cannot leave them alone to entertain or amuse themselves or use time constructively because they simply don't know how.
After years and hours of television cartoons, commercials and conditioning, learning to concentrate while not thinking and to think without listening, these children are unable to cope with relationships, hardships or apprenticeships.
Sure they are cute when they are infants. They giggle and respond to affection; they eat what they're fed, wear what we provide, fit our expectations and hopes. Parenthood is simply wonderful, just like the TV world, until early in the child's years of semi-independence, say about the third year. From then on they begin to make demands and offer nothing in return.
Children demand, need, insist upon time, our time, valuable time, important time, time that we adult parents should be giving to career and income and self-development and community building and personal actualization. We need time to earn money in order to give to these kids the things they really must have in order to be modern, complete, fashionable, nourished, enriched, fulfilled, satisfied, un-deprived, un-denied and culturally developed. We need time to be educated and trained to find the best paying career in order to build the family room, the living room, the vacation house, the swimming pool the education fund, the wardrobe, the dance, polo, music lessons, the little league, the organized after school, weekend classes in family.
Kids require organization and scheduling and training and uniforms and special shoes, (there is a sale on Adidas, Kick the Can, Capture the Flag shoes for concrete and macadam, designed to be worn without tying, at the nearest mall.) Yet, these grown-up games for kids or the kids' games for grownups can only take a small bit of time and only a fraction of the energy of adolescents. When not sleeping or getting their salt and sugar fix, they have nothing to do. There are no chores or contributory duties to perform. There are no tasks or jobs or errands or useful activities for them. And we must not add stress, pressure, tension or demands to their tender, budding personalities. It annoys them.
Children are in the way. They don't fit any place: not in school or the home; not on the street or in the stores or the playground; not on the highways or the parking lots; not even in their own backyards.
All they do is take up space, make mounds of debris, break bottles, consume valuable resources, create noise, pollution and otherwise have a negative impact on our orderly adult world which we've worked hard to create.
These emerging adults make no recognizable contribution to our world. They give nothing, add nothing, provide nothing. They are bored, restless, sometime angry, rude self-centered and unmanageable.
They insist on fashions, fads, technologies, as current as the morning paper but tire of their accumulated goodies before the evening edition is on the streets. So, even when some kind of well-meaning attention if offered, when some genuine care is attempted, some understanding is submitted, the result is a disdainful rejection because children don't fit any more. They are out of place without form or function, purpose or program. They are strangers in a stranger land.
Oh, we mean well, as mature adults who marry so wisely. We are motivated only by noble dreams, ambitions and goals. We really do want children, or at least babies. Babies prove our manhood, our womanhood. Babies save marriages and give us warm feeling of accomplishment. Babies give us company, security, a sense of purpose. Babies are easy to control. They respond so readily to our smiles and stern voices.
Sure, we are certainly old enough, smart enough to have babies. But, still we have work to do, careers to chase, homes to furnish, carpets to protect, grass to tend and dollars to fetch.
We may have dining rooms where we do not dine, living rooms when we do not live, family rooms where there is no family, and bedrooms where we cannot sleep, but the babies outgrow their nursery and become adolescents.
And that's our problem. We want babies. But children?, that's different.
So, to give ourselves a chance to allow this modern, sophisticated, adult, mature, really informed, sane world a chance to catch up with changes, trends and issues, it would be best if we simply didn't have babies for awhile.
Let those now in cribs reach age twenty-five. We could learn how to harness their vitality, to fit our ordered environment. We would learn where to put the eleven year old, the fourteen and seventeen year olds, how to educate them and discipline them, how to love and understand them. But we need time, time to breathe, time to think, time to organize, time to be modern and mature.
We must buy this time by not having children!

Richard E. Lake