What do you even have children for?

Yesterday I already started explaining my feelings for full-time schools. I told you why I thought it is a horrible way to press children into a system already at an age when they should actually be playing freely and without stress or pressure. Individuality gets lost, responsibility of education is given to teachers who refuse to take them and children who don’t fit in have big disadvantages. Today however I would like to elaborate on my second thought which was directed a bit more towards the parents: What do you even have children for?

I know that this formulation sounds quite harsh but if you have a look at the matter without any embellishment, without sugarcoating any of the facts, the question suggests itself!

In Germany parents now have the right for a place in a day-care center as soon as their child is three years old. Many, many parents however already give their child into such an institution when they are much younger, at the age of about one year, six months or even three months! How much time will you really spend with your child? Why did you get a child just to give it into the hands of others so quickly?

Have a look at it realistically: you had three months with your baby from the day it was born. After that, you work and pick it up for the evenings and nights, most of which you will spend with sleeping. There are the weekends, yes, but there are also other things to do, chores, duties and of course visits with the rest of the family. There is awfully little time that you can truly spend together.

The child gets older and goes from day nursery to kindergarten, from kindergarten to school. The school is a full-time school and both you and your child are used to this rhythm already. Your baby is a teenager before you even know it and, as it is normal in western countries, wants to spend less and less time with you. You are out, old, not cool enough. Even if he or she has a better opinion of you, spare time is rarely spent with parents – friends, music instruments, sports, parties, there is so much more to do than sit at home!

At the age of eighteen, your ‘little one’ moves out and starts his own life independently. You visit sometimes on the weekends. Your child starts his own family and there is even less time. You yourself grow older, too, and finally stop working. You move into a home for the elderly and hope for your child to find time in the busy schedule to visit.

Looking back onto a life like this, how much time did you really spend with your child? What did you have a child for? What did you get? Of course there will be some moments of love that you cherish a lot – but don’t you think you could have had so much more if you had just had more time together? If you had spent the days with each other? Were you not expecting more fulfillment from becoming parents?

No, I think something is going horribly wrong in the society when these questions come up! And yes, I explicitly say that it is the society that is going the wrong way – because parents are very often not happy to give their children away either! But that is another aspect which I will write about tomorrow.