All children are blessings

My Christmas post!

One of the two discussion books our small group has been studying this year is on family. And as these discussions go, a couple of times the issue of having children has come up a few times. The opinions in my small group and from my other friends span the entirerange: “No way José”, “Still deciding”, and “Would love to have”.

To be totally honest, I oscillated a little about “starting a family”. Early on, that wanting was actually there. I mean, I had loads of fun with my nephews Danyel and Issac when I stayed at Lentor, and have a lot of admiration of how my elder brother and Jasmine brought them up. However, after I started working teaching 17-18 year olds, I started getting cold feet! I mean, just looking at the kind of trouble they get into… teenage pregnancies, and all the media reports about 17 year old girls posting up suggestive and revealing photos to attract boys and thinking  nothing of it. Or meeting up DOMs from chat lines. It’s scary stuff, especially if it’s your child who’s in that kind of trouble.

But there were two places I found encouragement in. One was from words my Godmother shared with me 15 years ago while I was a student in NTU. She firmly believed that if you bring your children up right in the first 18 years before they hit maturity, they’ll turn out OK. So, she disciplined her children when it was called for. And she has two wonderful grown-up children now, both I think in their mid and late twenties and who went on to do Ph.Ds at the Ivy League.

The second source of encouragement weren’t from words but from reason. Those fears that the children we have will turn into brats. But our own parents and before them faced those fears too, and didn’t we turn out just fine too?

OK, so one may argue conditions are very different today. We’re exposed if not outright bombarded by far more social values than our parents were at equivalent ages. 100, maybe even just 30 years ago, your formative years were spent maybe in a kampung. These days, the kids are connected to the larger world early on, and often at ages where they just may not have the maturity to decide what’s right and wrong.

But didn’t our own parents have the same fears even if the context then wasn’t the Internet or cultural invasion? Whether it’s fear of not being able to manage children, or fear of not retaining one’s beautiful body post-delivery, or just wanting to have a ‘two-person world’ as the Chinese phrase goes. If our parents had somewhere concluded not to have children, we wouldn’t be here discussing now right? Scary thought. *shudder*

After having thought it through and (re)convinced myself that having a family is the best thing we could do with our lives together, I no longer think those difficulties are insurmountable. If having children was a mistake, there would, reasonably, be plenty of parents around us that regret having children.

But none of my friends who’re mothers and/or fathers have said any such thing. Nada, zilch. Oh, of course sometimes they sound like they’re about to tear their hair out. But that’s always temporal. Their love and affection for their little ones always comes through.

One of our small group friends, Priscilla, said something during her prayer that Ling found very meaningful: that all children are blessings. If nothing else, if children weren’t supposed to be a blessing, our Lord would have said so.

He instead said quite the opposite:

“Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.” (Psalm 127:3)