Birth rate

Chatting the other day with a friend who just became a father, we calculated that, had he and his wife had the social benefits he and his wife are enjoying for having a child, the State would owe me, my wife and the whole family more than two years of sick leave.

I agree with all the benefits provided by the administrations to help families, especially in the first years of their children's lives, but I predict that we will need more than labor or economic stimuli if we want to get out of the crisis. demographic winter we've gotten ourselves into.

And, let's not forget, the popularization of contraceptives and the use of the abortion as another method at the end of the twentieth century meant a paradigm shift in the depths of human identity. Children ceased to be a surprise gift that life had in store for us (or not), and became an object that could only be accessed if it was part of the parents' plans.

Thus, people began to be born on demand, destined to satisfy the most disparate human desires. Perhaps you, who read me, were once for your parents a cuddly toy-person, a mirror-person or a couple-person. And obviously, things of life, maybe you did not satisfy your parents' wishes at all, because, in the first case, your character is surly and you always forget to call them by their birthday; in the second case, you did not follow your father's career and did not want to inherit your mother's business; and, in the third case, you turned out to be of the same sex as the first offspring, annoying one of your two parents.  

Sons, however they come, have a damned habit of not stating their specifications in advance and in detail, as befits any good Amazon product. Many, many of them go wrong and do not do what the applicant wants, but what they want them to do. They don't even take care of the parents anymore when it's time for them to be taken care of, which in fairness compensated for the effort of raising them. 

So, why become parents, how can we motivate couples to bet on life? To answer this question, we need only go back a few decades in time and analyze what happened at the time when we were conceived, the so called baby boomers, What was it about our families that caused the birth rate to experience such a sharp increase in the post-World War II population explosion? boom of such caliber? Certainly, the economic boom helped, but today we are much richer than then and everything seems little to us. What really encouraged families not to be afraid of their children was not to be afraid of tomorrow. The fact of having left the wars behind made society look forward with illusion, since any future time would always be better than the war hell. A pregnancy was a reason to rejoice because it was considered a good for the family, for the people, for society.  

The economic and working conditions were not particularly good, many worked from dawn to dusk or had to emigrate, but there was hope. In a recent speech, the Pope has just affirmed that: "if few children are born, it means that there is little hope", denouncing that the young generations "grow up in uncertainty, if not in disillusionment and fear. They live in a social climate in which to establish a family is becoming a titanic effort, rather than a shared value that everyone recognizes and supports."

I have witnessed on a few occasions how people have no qualms about scolding a young, proud mother with her precious baby in her arms for bringing it into the world because of "how bad things are and how much work they are".

A baby is a slap in the face of the general bitterness that invades us, of the supposed progress with a vinegar face; it is a fart in the face of the prophets of calamity; it is a cry of hope in the midst of a world self-absorbed in indulging itself without realizing that men and women are fulfilled in service, in giving to others and to the whole world.

A son is a banner that says NO to consumerism, NO to individualism, NO to the loss of human bonds, NO to the collective suicide we have embarked on as a society jaded by earthly goods, but with nothing to look forward to, with no common sense.

It is urgent to return to intangible and spiritual values, those that made us leave the cave and progress as a species looking forward, without fear of the future, pushing each other as a tribe. Do you want children? Seek the source of hope that does not fail. It is worth more than all the gold in the world.