We Need More Babies, Not Less!
By: Pooja Kothari
Tags: Family, Baby, Motherhood, India, Children

India needs more procreation, but the citizens only want recreation.

Photo by Marcel Fagin on Unsplash

If you grew up in the 1980s and 90s, you would remember hearing hum do, hamare do — the famous family planning slogan that encouraged people to have fewer children. Imagine my surprise then when I read that India’s fertility is plummeting—enough for Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar to raise an alarm in his weekly column in Times of India.

For the sake of our country, we need to have more children, I mention to the husband after reading the column. “We already did that when we had two,” promptly he answers. That’s one more than either of our sisters, he reminds me.

Perhaps we should have another one; we might get third time lucky and have a girl, I retort, taking a dig at his failure to contribute the right chromosome — not once, but twice.

We’ll be able to keep up with the Baijals, who got themselves a brand new pup during the lockdown. Baby, puppy, what’s the difference? Both have to be potty trained and will pee around the house. At least the child will be less dangerous than a Rottweiler, me thinks!

Dogs, bikes and babies. That’s what everyone did last year through the six-week country-wide shut down. Remember those days, when we thought we’ll beat corona in 21 days with our thalis, started baking banana bread with gusto and spent all that quality time with the spouse? Of course, there were bound to be more babies nine months later.

Even the celebrities joined the fun. Anushka, Kareena, Diya, and now Frieda have all had a kid, or are having one. Everyone’s doing their bit to make the WHO prediction of a ‘post pandemic baby boom’ come true.

Yet, Aiyar isn’t happy with the way things are. He wants the government to stop penalizing those who have more than two kids, among other things.

My mind drifts back to the mid-2000s, when I was a newly-minted do-bachon-ki-Ma. My Nani had nine children, my Mom four. Yet, neither thought it prudent to warn me ahead of the arrival of the second child. The work didn’t just double — it grew exponentially.

You have to wake up in the morning to send the older child to school, so what if you’ve been up all night with the colicky second one! Throw in a full-time job in the mix — and you truly understand why goddesses have multiple arms.

There is no way I could have managed to have a career and two children without my Mom. Literally. She took over on the 84th day of my maternity leave so I could “go back to work”.

I, of course, ran to the office. Compared to the non-stop crying of a new born, my boss’ complaints were music to my ears. After 12 weeks of no breaks, I had the pleasure of coffee breaks and water cooler chats every few hours. And I could stare at a screen for eight hours instead of a diaper full of crap every two hours.

Cut to present, I’ve seen my younger sister struggle, along with her 8-y-o daughter, through online classes during the past year. My young neighbor has two boys below 5 years of age — I’m surprised she is still a functioning adult a year later.

I, on the other hand, smugly put into practice my one-room-per-child policy and forgot about the kids from morning to afternoon. My bliss was ruptured only by the sight of an ‘absent’ on the child’s report card — he managed that while logged in to class every day!

I’m sure fellow parents are being reminded of all the school fees we’ve paid for the past year without the upside of a few kid-free hours — that’s reason enough not to repeat the error of our ways!