Siblings or a single child –parent’s classic dilemma!

What makes a family complete? I don’t think it is only about a family member or a child. Rather what makes the family complete is mutual understanding, sharing of responsibilities and taking care of each other’s interests. Whether with one child or more one must ensure that your family supports the condition of understanding and there would be no looking back. Bearing and raising children  is a purely parental perspective and varies from couple to couple and family to family. Many factors affect this decision, the key ones being:

• Individual health and physical conditions
• Financial standing and savings
• Family support and affection
• Sheer willingness to experience parenthood once again

There are no set rules or guidelines, no law of nature that governs this aspect of your life unless it is an accidental pregnancy and you don’t know what to do with it. Let us evaluate the finer side of this life decision by pondering over the positives and negatives of having more than one child:

Positives:

1. The child enjoys sibling fun and grows up sharing and caring with the other.
2. Gradually parents can reduce their involvement in the child’s life and let them be there for each other.
3. They have a companion for life in the form of their sibling, in all the twists and turns that one faces.
4. The younger child ends up learning a lot from the older one and vice versa.
5. While one child is away due to multiple reasons the other one is around for you.

Negatives:

1. Financial pressure may arise due to academic and day to day expenses of more than one child.
2. Managing sibling fights and rivalry requires patience and time.
3. The initial phase of parenthood seems stretched because after having raised one child by a few years, you go through the entire process once again.
4. You constantly perform the balancing act as you manage the interests and curriculum of both the children.
5. You get very little ‘me time’ or ‘we time’ because you have one of your children around at any given point during the day.

We are blessed with a mind that thinks and a heart that loves, if both of them indicate in a direction then that is the path to follow. Another most important element of this is partner interest, which is a MUST to live by whatever decision you take. Also if the older child is grown up, one should seek his/her opinion on the same. And lastly what matters the most is living in complete acceptance and awareness and it should be enough to make your family complete. So what do you think? Please do share your views in the comments section below.