How I've Been Put Off Parenting For Life

Recently, I've been given the shock of my life and realised through the medium of frustration and fear that being a parent would be the most painful experience imaginable. How? By watching a few episodes of Outnumbered.

Although previously I was never really considering becoming a parent anytime soon and at no point did it look easy; my feelings on parenthood have now gone into a stage of depression and will take plenty of rehabilitation. At least 20 years.

Although Outnumbered is an excellent sitcom displaying the everyday hardships of a modern day family, it does have its down sides. How can this make parenting appealing to anyone?

Don't get me wrong, I love the show. I think that the children particularly are hilarious, especially Karen and Ben, whose incredibly pedantic approach to life makes even the simplest of tasks almost impossible. The older child though, Jake, seems less annoying to me and more boring. He should be kicked off the show immediately on the grounds of not being a total immature gimp and making children seem slightly tolerable.

If at any point in my life I'm stuck with a monster of a seven year old boy like Ben, I will be caused to kill someone. Either myself or the child.

I'm not joking (sort of) because everything that child does in any of the episodes is just plain annoyance and this is credit to the actor I suppose. A good sitcom should be judged by the genuine emotions it brings out of the reader and during one episode of Ben's actions alone, I experienced anger, frustration, depression and near insanity. Near, not total.

The reaction's of the parents is also brilliant as I'm sure parents across the nation watching the show will nod in approval of how typically painful the lives of the parents are. This is extremely realistic, I know this because I can remember my parents' reactions to me as a child, and they were generally in frustration. And to be fair I wasn't even a particularly bad child, just an annoying little bugger.

Although the show gave me great entertainment, it did become painful to watch after about three episodes due to the aforementioned sins against the basic human right of not being driven into suicidal mode by hyper lunatics (that, by the way, still isn't a 100% official human right just yet).

That got me thinking into how we could manage the problem as a nation, and I gained inspiration from China's 'one baby policy' whereby each couple can only have one child each.

This turned out to be unsustainable for many reasons, yet I have made an advance on the policy to make it utterly sustainable. Change it to a no child policy!

I'm sure you'll agree, that this is a flawless plan and literally nothing can go wrong.

If no children are being born, then the population is decreasing. People are always moaning about how an exponential increase in population is leading to a lack of resources and higher pollution levels amongst other things, my new theory of a solution would solve this problem majorly.

Secondly, a criticism of China's idea was that only boys were in demand as children because they could continue the family name and gain better jobs; leaving numerous baby girls abandoned, aborted or put up for adoption. This problem would also be avoided with my 'no child plan' as there would be no children to choose from, so no body is aborted or left homeless to die. This will no doubt keep the Samaritans happy and in favour of my idea.

A third advantage, amongst the infinite number of plus points, is that adults can actually life their own lives without worrying about children.

They're always complaining about how much better their lives would be in the absence of chidren, well this is their chance to prove it by spending their hard earned cash on themselves and themselves only, they might even find time to donate some to charity.

I don't know what my parents were like before the hand children because, well I wasn't born; and I don't want to ask them in case they realise that actually their lives back them were far more interesting and end up kicking me out as a result.

Yet I imagine they had far more freedom and spare cash to treat themselves with.

Actually, on second thoughts, with no children to spend money on, I imagine my Dad put all his money in a 10,000% interest ISA which can't be touched for a million years until it 'matures'. This may seem utterly pointless, yet it would provide an income for any aliens that plan to invade earth after we are gone.

So I have proved that by not having any children, Britain can save the world, potentially. Population increase would disappear along with all its problems; less children will be abandoned and lastly we'll save little baby aliens that hatch on earth in a million years time. If that's not sustainable planning, I don't know what is.

That, in a nutshell, is why I will never ever be Prime Minister.

That and the fact I'm not an ugly, middle aged fat ogre like previous Prime Ministers, such as Margaret Thatcher.