I get a lot of people telling me to have another child, claiming the one I have is bored or will get bored because she is alone. That got me wondering: society automatically assumes children who don’t have siblings lead boring, if not miserable, lives. Someone even accused me of being unfair to my daughter and not caring about her well-being!
You know, people should learn that we all have choices in life and our choices are squarely determined by our dreams and goals. Some circumstances are actually unavoidable.
This is my fourth year as a parent and I can tell you no single day have I ever felt like my daughter is bored because she doesn’t have a sibling. I am the nuclear family she has and we are enjoying every single moment together.
Come to think of it, why would someone miss something they have never experienced? As it is, she has never had a sibling and so blaming non-existent siblings for her misery is out of place. Personally, I was born in a family of eight children and, trust me, if I were to weigh fights against actual play in our childhood, fights would carry the day.
But I must say it was fun growing up around different characters but that alone isn’t enough to claim my siblings and I enjoyed our childhood more than those children with no siblings. Fun actually comes from within us, we don’t have to peg it on anyone and anything. You should see how active my daughter is in the house, having the time of her life with no sibling.
Then there are those guilt-trippers who will tell you that having one child is a risky affair. Don’t you all know we live by taking risks? Everything that we do in this life is or was first a gamble that yielded whatever results.
I have friends who have given in to pressure and gone ahead to have other children just to please society. So what happens when you end up giving birth to two children with very different characters? Will you not have two ‘bored’ children in your house?
I tell people that the moment I decided to become a mother is the moment I took back my childhood. If I feel like my daughter needs serious juvenile company in the house, I will give it to her by bringing myself to her level.
There’s nothing hard in pretending to be a child. If anything, it’s harder pretending to be a wife. For my daughter, I can be a donkey, a Mercedes, a tall building, whatever! Again, I am bringing up my daughter in a way that she will have a diverse understanding of the world and not peg her happiness on other people or things.
Most of the time when I tell people that I have one child, the next statement that comes out of their mouths is “Why? Don’t you think your daughter gets bored?” People should learn that a child’s life does not revolve around their siblings. Children have a very ‘big’ world, bigger than ours. They create that world into what they wish and live it with no regrets.
To those who imagine that children without siblings get bored, what do you think we do to them? Lock them in a room? Next time you meet a parent with one child, don’t start telling them that they are being unfair to their children. You are a non-issue when it comes to the number of children they would wish to pop.
If you feel like your child’s happiness depends on a sibling, go ye therefore and fill the earth. The rest of us will add more babies if and when we wish. Till then, allow us to be their siblings. Next time I will come for the lot that pegs a child’s happiness on both parents.
itindiberyl@gmail.com
Have you ever?