Just How Many Children Can You Cope With?

by Cwynire Thursday, March 17, 2011 3 comments Mama WAHM

When discussing about managing children, the young mothers are often compared to their mothers or grandmothers, and how they were able to cope with even more children ... like 8 or even 12, yet without maids. I'm referring to the situation in Malaysia where most families those days were big families. Of course you shouldn't look at it from just one angle ... read as I am about to 'defend' us new mothers ...

Time Has Changed ...

I have ultimate respect to our mothers and their mothers for having successfully managed their children in those difficult times. I'd say you and I turned out alright didn't we? Nevertheless, I think that we new mothers are also going through challenging times. These are not the times when we can let our children roam around the neighborhood and come home before sundown. These are not the times when we can keep them free from outrages negative input, now that we have the internet. Children don't even have to search for these junks on the web. The junks are fed to them through banner advertising in websites we would deem okay for them e.g. blogs, Facebook, even sent to their e-mails (an issue for older kids). I dare not let my children Google for their homework without me being around as a simple innocent image-search can lead to loathing displays of stuffs that can pollute children's minds!

My mother used to tell me that in her childhood, she and her siblings would play the whole day and come home when it was time to eat, then later flee again and come home before Maghrib to clean themselves, have dinner, etc. When they hurt themselves due to falls, etc, they'd come home, get some good spanking first, get treated next, then eat and play again outside. Well, that's what she said  So 8, 10, or 14 children, they were mostly playing outside. But how about today's children? Unless they are sent to various classes and such, they'd be mostly stuck at home. Children are creative and playful, and when indoors, their creative ideas and mischief are now most of the time visible to the parents ... well at least when the parents are at home themselves.

Of course the bigger issue would be the children's safety. In our time, with even more drug addicts and psychos out there, how can any mom be at peace letting kids off by themselves? With better neighborhood spirit & watch that our mothers/grandmothers had those days, the comfort level with regards to the children's safety cannot be compared to that of these times.

What Did We Get Ourselves Into?

Often I feel as though the challenges of these days are unnecessary burden that we ourselves create and get ourselves into due to modernization. The stolen freedom/safety due to lack of neighborhood spirit, the lack of time/focus for the children due to the need to survive these days' financial crisis (or is it our desire to achieve with regards to career). If our ancestors had to deal with days of war, we have ourselves to deal with 'internal wars' of a complex life which should have been simple. Hence, why maybe most of us can only cope with at most 6 children these days, or possibly less.

Let's pay our respect to our mothers and their mothers for their motherhood journey, but don't forget to give ourselves too some credit for going through motherhood in these challenging times. I guess I can only cope with 5.