Futures of the World by Xiao Qi

Futures of the World by Xiao Qi - January 2023 Scholarship Essay

Imagine this scenario: as a high school senior, despite the warnings of those around her, a young girl finally decided to tie the knot with her boyfriend of 8 months. Despite the brief period of time she has been dating in a committed relationship, she feels that they are each other's soulmates, and nobody has previously ever made her feel more loved than he does. Therefore, when he recommended that she perform this action unprotected, she hesitantly agreed as she knew he would always be there for her. That is until, she discovered a few months before her due date that she was pregnant with his child. From there, her world came crashing down. Her loving boyfriend decided he no longer wanted a relationship with her to “focus on himself”, her loyal friends bullied her, and her open-minded parents kicked you out of the house. At this point, she is incredibly lost in life and deeply regrets her choice that day, but it is too late. With the delivery of the baby being so close, she fears that aborting now may cause complications and decides against it. Life appears to have passed by her in a flash and now she has a newborn in hand with no idea how to care for it, but is determined to.

Desperate, she scours the web for resources to help her: “How to feed a newborn infant?” and “Can infants drink formula?” are a few amongst hundreds searched. All around the world, many people are under the impression that women inherently know more than men about how to raise children, but in reality without any actual experience most are just as clueless. Although this scenario is imaginary, everyday around the world we live in both men and women face the issue of lack of awareness on how to raise future children to be healthy, independent adults that will perform well in modern society. Navigating through this journey as new parents is tough as is, but the struggles are even worse for single parents. Yet in 2021 alone, there were more than approximately 17 million children living with only a single parent and amongst teenagers about 14.4 births per 1,000 females in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Pregnancy and birth are significant contributors to high school dropout rates among women, as well as lower school achievement and increased risk of health issues, incarceration, and unemployment.” Through these statistics, we can see that teenage and single parents are commonly found and despite mandatory sexual education courses, teenage pregnancy ultimately ends up occurring anyways.

Children are the future and the world depends on them to carry on our legacies. As they continue to grow, being properly cared for, especially during infancy is crucial to their overall development as a person. Consequently, I think that everyone should be required to take courses on how to raise children because they are incredibly important and not enough people are knowledgeable enough to do so well. Oftentimes, this can lead to increased rates of adolescent incarceration, crime, drop outs, and more. Even for people who are not single or teenage parents, millions of normal, everyday parents are not properly educated on child development. Rather than having first time parents experiment on tactics raising their first born child to improve on potential future children, why not teach them how to do so correctly the first time? Since there are always children in the world, everyone learns how to care for them because it is very likely that at some point in their life they will find themselves interacting or caring for them, so it is paramount that they have the knowledge to treat them properly. Just one, tiny mistake is all it takes to traumatize a child forever, so for the sake of our society’s future a class on child care and development should be mandatory. Additionally, the skills that are taught in this course can create transferable skills applied to other areas in life such as sympathy, leadership, critical thinking, efficiency, etc. so for those who do not intend to have children anywhere near them, the class itself is not a complete waste of time and effort.