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The selfless acts of parents to protect their children have always amazed me. The passion with which parents talk about their kids, and the tremendous amount of love they describe having for them have always been a complete mystery to me.

Indeed, the whole spectrum of parental feelings is a conundrum to me. This is not at all odd, however, since I don’t have kids yet myself. The weirdest thing is probably the fact that I don’t understand the reasons why people decide to have kids in the first place!

A few days ago, I was reading an interesting book about psychology. One chapter talks about the way infants interact with their parents as a means of explaining the roots of human emotions. Since the human mind is probably the most important topic of interest to me, for a moment I flirted with the idea of having a child in order to thoroughly understand some of those phenomena I was reading about.

Instantly, I caught myself thinking that this would probably be a selfish reason for having kids. Then I entered into a long debate with myself, and with many other people, about the reasons people decide to have kids, because for me – apart from the ‘accidental’ knock-ups – all the other possible reason for having kids seem selfish, too.

Think about it; there are many reasons why people decide to have kids – because they want to ‘enjoy’ them, because they want to have an extension of themselves, because they want to keep their names alive, because they want someone to take care of them when they get old, to take over their kingdom when they die, to increase the number of fighters in the tribe, or even just to get a further KD 50 in allowances!

I tried to come up with one selfless reason for which people would decide to have kids, but I couldn’t. The most common reasons, though, are having no protection, wrong calculations, or running out of contraceptives. For men, the most common reasons would be ignorance and laziness. For some women, it’s either to ‘tie their husbands to them,’ as some told me, or due to the hormones that make them want to fulfill their biological duty (feminists, please don’t get angry, I am only talking about their biological duty to give birth, not implying that this is the only duty that women have).

Whenever people think about having kids, they only consider their own good, their own point of view, their own interests. Nobody really looks into whether he can provide these new people with what they need to live a happy life. People tend to make the mistake, and then after having kids, and instinctively loving them, try to do whatever they can to make them happy. They just don’t make these calculations until after they have kids. People don’t even think about whether or not the world is a good place toinvite our most beloved future people to live in.

I am not saying that this is necessarily wrong. Maybe we really can’t logically explain our instincts, as some friends of mine argued. I am just trying to come up with a ‘right’ reason to have kids, that doesn’t seem selfish to me. If I can come up with one, I would love to have kids, but I just don’t think that the fact that I simply want to is enough reason to do so.

Ahmad Saeid – Kuwait Times