O Father, who are you? - A Theory (Amit Mehra Productions)

Background 1: I have been married for a while now & we have decided not have kids.
Background 2: India, where I belong, has the 2nd largest population in the world

Years after we took that decision of not having any kids, I still ponder if we took the right decision. Largely because I look around myself and everyone keeps producing kids, irrespective of their financial, social or physical state. There's just nothing that can make people stop producing kids. Most people, at least in India, are going to great lengths & pains to have kids. Marriages are broken; relationships are made based on the abilities to produce kids.

continue...

Interesting article, and I like your theory, although I think it may be a complex of needs - power, a sense of hope/renewal, love, to exist in some form beyond death, feeling a purpose to life, etc.

Aparna


------------
(Actually, I thought it was very interesting, and close to the truth in a good many cases. But given our capacity for self-deception, our assumption of noble motives for everything we do, I can see why this theory exercise would jar a lot of people. So the brief comment there.

Already there is a good deal of cynicism about what used to be old ideals - work is about money, life is about getting ahead, patriotism is about right to be treated better than foreigners more than duties, romance is no longer about feeling but a score-card of things given and gotten. The last bastion of selflessness is parenthood, so attack it at the risk of rousing wrath among those who worship it.

I'm not a parent. Neither is the author, according to this article. Presumably, people who are parents are shaking their heads and going "What do these people know?".

Becoming a parent is a biological process. As Elaine says in the Seinfeld show, "It's not like it takes some kind of talent!". Being a human parent, though, is a lifetime job. Unlike dogs and cats, we don't walk away and leave our offspring to survive on their own, after a while. And in that way, we have more vested interests in our offspring than just their survival or our need to reproduce. By the time the kid is an adult, we have spent more than two decades taking care of them and teaching them what we know. Is there anything else in life you would give this much, without expectations in return? I don't know why we expect parents to be selfless.

For delicious irony, I quote my aunt to her own son, "I did so much for you when you were young, without ever thinking of my own comforts, for what? So that now you will ignore us and call once in six months? Why should I be so selfless had I known you are going to be so self-centered?"

It's a rare parent that says "I've done my job, now go live your life, and it doesn't matter to me if your life no longer needs my presence". That would be a selfless parent.)