My unpopular opinion about parenthood

One of the things I do on Sundays is have conversations with my mom, and today she was telling me about 2 students in her class. One has a single mom and the other, a single dad. According to what she was saying, it seems their parents left them right after they were born and never came back.

Even before she continued, I asked her what if those parents who left the kids were dead, and she laughed. She told me those parents were even now married to new people and have had new kids. It got me very confused but only confirmed my unpopular opinion about parenthood.

So many times, we hear stories of people giving birth and not taking care of them. Others even give birth and leave them at weird places. The other time, there was this viral video of a baby who was left in the bush, and I kept trying to understand what exactly was going through the mother's head. And it wasn’t even a path or a farm, just grown bush.

Say you couldn’t send your baby to the orphanage for some reason; why would you walk away from people, houses, roads and leave that baby in the bush? What if nobody saw the baby? What if, what if, what if! A lot of what ifs. What exactly were you trying to achieve?

If you ask me, I think parenthood should be earned. How? I think not everyone deserves to be a parent, and even from the little I’ve said above, you can see where I’m coming from. I have this weird theory in my head where I believe that our way of life should be an audition for parenthood.

For example, after you get to 20 years, the life you have lived should be analyzed, and that will tell if you should be a parent or not. I know people will say there are reckless teens who grew up to be wonderful parents, while other disciplined people grew up to be otherwise. That’s a story for another day.

When children misbehave, society is so quick to criticize them, but we see a lot of irresponsible parents and say nothing about it in the name of “we are minding our business.” I’ve seen instances where people even justified the irresponsible behavior of a parent which up till now makes no sense to me.
As long as irresponsible parents exist, that unpopular opinion of mine will be number one on my list.