Last week I wrote about happiness and what we as a society hold to be true about happiness. I discussed how we put off our happiness to when we achieve certain goals, for example getting married or getting a certain degree. I would like to continue those thoughts as I evaluate the most popular achievement we put happiness on; children.

One day in my Gender Communication class, we were viewing a documentary that made the following statement; “Mother Nature’s wisest action was to tie the act of reproduction to pleasure.” I really liked that idea, that the act of creating new life was something that every animal found was so enjoyable that more and more lives were be created. It’s genius. Hats off the Mama N.

Then I began to think about how the human race has taken that and further tied it to happiness. In our present society, the greatest joy in life is to have children. We even call babies “bundles of joy.” The act of creating new life is so tied to happiness that we make entire celebrations out of the day a person is born. We’ve conditioned ourselves to believe that there is no greater happiness in life than that of birth.

Here’s the thing, some people don’t want children. I could be mistaken, but children are expensive and they are loud and you have to stay with them for 18 years. That’s a really big commitment. Some people don’t want that, and they are perfectly fine with not having children. They’re happy not to have to be someone’s parent, and that’s their prerogative.

The other side of that is people who can’t have children. From what I can tell from my limited amount of sex education, the act of reproduction requires a lot of important things to occur almost by sheer coincidence. Quite a bit of people, for a plethora of reasons, can’t get all of those things to happen, and thus aren’t able to conceive a child. These are the people society is hurting the most.

These people are asked repeatedly why they don’t have children, asked why they’re waiting, asked if they want to be happy.

I can’t fully understand what that’s like but I can imagine that it feels like a hot knife every single time it’s asked. They get better at answering it, but the pain doesn’t go away. They feel like they’ve failed in some way, or that they’ll never be happy. They internalize the things they’re taught about obtaining “the greatest joy in life”.

They haven’t failed, and they will be happy. Happiness isn’t a one-track achievement, it’s something that every person defines for themselves. Children aren’t the be-all, end-all, of what it takes to be happy in life.

We need to keep these people in mind as we go through life. If someone doesn’t have children and they’ve been married a certain amount of years, just assume that they don’t need them to happy. We can’t know what’s going on with someone, and so when it comes to this issue it’s better to let these people live.

Honestly, I believe that human child raising is slightly unnatural. No other animal on Earth stays with it’s young 18 years past birth. It’s a miracle that there’s not more women with postpartum depression. And then there’s parenting teenagers; I literally have no idea how any parent, mine included, are able to put up with being in the same space as someone going through that time. Coming into sexually maturity around the members of our species who already have is not that fun. That’s why every other animal on Earth leaves around the time this happens.

That’s the reason I believe every human who doesn’t have a child “when they should”, doesn’t. Unless you tell me otherwise I’ll just think that you don’t want kids. Hell, I’m not sure if I even want them and I love kids!