Monday, November 26, 2007

bob's my uncle!


a friend recently shared this very interesting observation. and it hit me when i thought about it. and i'm sure it will hit you as well :-)

we were talking about the recent trend of many recently married couples who willingly choose not to have children or to have only a single child. earlier i had written a post about the benefits of having at least two kids - the second solution!

my friend then said that we will soon have a significant number of kids who will not have brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, no brothers-in-law or sisters-in-law, no co-brothers or co-sisters, and so on and so forth! and as this trend continues it will be even more stark.

most kids will only have theoretical knowledge about such relationships and will not be able to understand what these actually mean in real life. in fact, over time, they would start wondering whether such people and such relationships actually existed!

i guess it would be similar to our understanding of kings and queens and dinosaurs too!?

such kids would lose out on the joys of visiting relatives, vacationing with cousins, the scores of marriages in the family which are usually an excuse to fix some more marriages and also have a feast with good food and the company of near and distant family for a comfortably short period of time!

i wonder what fond memories the children in the future would have

3 comments:

~nm said...

:) This is something that I had pondered over about 3 years ago when Anirudh was about 6 months or so. That time my convictions of having a second child were strong. Quite Strong. And thats why I was wondering if everyone decides to have just one child, who will the be the mausi or the bua or the tai or chachi or mami. Will there be a chacha, tauji, mausaji or a mamaji for the kids of this generation?

But like the others whom I judged those days, I've also succumbed to just-one-child idea. I guess I've.

Swati said...

Well we think that way even two kids are not enough for experiencing all relationships (this does not mean i don't want another kid).
We cannot just let the population grow for building relations for our kids.
The next generation will find Uncles and Aunts and relatives which are not imposed by blood but choice.

Written Thoughts said...

I agree with ck guruprasad. Apart from the children missing those lovely experiences ( with whom else can you getaway after a no holds barred fight and go on as if it did not matter!) should we not consider for a country like India, it is the educated class that would be burdened with the not- so- educated class. What would it do the economy? The boom that we keep talking about, how long will it last?