It is astounding when a poor couple keeps having more children despite the fact that they struggle to find enough food to feed them. In most cases, you will find that rich couples only have one or two children while the poor couple can have up to six or more children.
What drives these people to do this? Some people say this happens because most poor people are illiterate and do not know how to use preventive measures to avoid falling pregnant. Others joke about it by saying sex is the only entertainment the poor couple has at night. Rich people go to bed late because they have to watch a late night movie or they are browsing the internet.
Many years ago, it was very common and normal to see a couple with not less than six children. Many of us were born in families where there were 4 or more brothers and sisters. I can't remember any family that had less than 5 children during my childhood days. All my friends came from a family that had an average of six children and all of them had an age difference of not more than 2 years.
I don't know whether this was an African tradition that had been carried on from long time ago. It was like some kind of prestige to have many children. Parents with more children were viewed with admiration and they introduced their children with pride to visitors. It was not a shame to hear someone proudly proclaiming "I have nine children, four boys and five girls".
At that time, many African women were full time house-wives and their sole purpose was to look after the family. But that has now changed. Many women are working or involved in businesses. This has resulted in many women reviewing their child bearing patterns to leave space for other things. In addition to that, many countries have undertaken serious campaigns on family planning. Couples are advised to space their children and plan for each child's future.
I refuse to accept that the reason why poor couples tend to have many children could be due to illiteracy because women are taught at the clinic in simple terms how to plan their families in their own local languages. They are also taught how to use contraceptives which are also cheaply available.
Maybe the reason why poor or underprivileged couples have many children could be attributed to the fact that they believe that these children will uplift their present living standards when they grow up and have their own jobs. In some ways what they do is putting up what may be termed a multiple investment. In old days, a large family usually had a large field and a huge harvest compared to a small family.
There is also one preposterous belief that when you have children, there are chances that some may die before they grow up. This was a very common belief many years back and I used to hear it a lot. People believed one must have eight or nine children so that if two or three passed away, you will still remain with five or four children. Having two children was considered a risk of losing all your children and remaining alone.
This may have been a reality in the old days before an advancement in modern medicines. A plague could devastate a whole village and sometimes even wipe out whole families. But now with the advent of modern medicine and prevention of many illnesses available, this has become a primitive idea.
The African culture values children so much that if a couple is married, everyone expects them to have a child with a year. If no child is forthcoming, that couple is viewed with suspicion and in almost all instances, the blame is on the woman. In some cultures, if a person dies at a ripe age without leaving any children, that person was buried with charms, to prevent his bad luck from returning in the family.
Sometimes even religion has an influence on such matters. Recently, the 45th general conference of the Presbyterian Church Women Wing in Aisawl, India, passed a resolution that an awareness campaign advocating women to conceive more children should be launched. Though this is in contravention to the national family planning policy, these church leaders believe the concept of multiplying is in accordance with the teachings of the bible in the old testament.
Ironically, the same underprivileged couples are so compassionate. In our society, when a relative dies and leaves behind children, other relatives take the responsibility of looking after those kids and in most cases, poor relatives are the ones left with this burden. The rich couples are reluctant to bring in their house a "dirty" illiterate child.
One man said the reason rich couples do not have many children is that they do not want to over pack their family car. And maybe this is one reason why the rich couples do not usually take responsibility of bringing orphans in their home because they know that the seats in the family car are already taken.
My own judgement on why poor couples have many children is because these people have a different plan for their kids. While a rich man will plan for the education of his kids, the poor man has no hope of educating his kids. The rich man will make sure before he has another child, the first child must be in a certain grade at school and he will have accumulated some money for the next child.
In the meantime, the poor man will think nothing about that. His plans for the children will be different. He will just think about how the kids will support each other when they grow up and the many they are, the better chances they will have to survive.
A poor person who does not have children will have no hope left at all.
Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
No comments:
Post a Comment