Friday, November 21, 2014

Raising Kids and Quality Time

The idea to this post can be attributed to one of the discussion that I had with this colleague of mine.  It was just a casual discussion that I had with him on having the kids and raising them.  Incidentally while talking about my daughter, he asked if I would like to have another kid or may be few more.  My answer was straight forward may be another one to make it "Hum 2 Humare 2 (we two and our two)".

As i made my point, he looked quizzingly as if asking "Why only 2 or if I had any logic behind restricting myself to raise 2 kids?" As I sensed that I happened to elaborate on the reasons for my decision that can be well defined as - 

  1. I would want to provide quality time to my kids as they grow up.  just think of it this way - you have 24 hours in a day, you work for say 10 hrs, showers and getting ready take another 1 hour, Food etc take another 1 hour and you sleep for say 8 hours.  Now you are left with only 4 hours to spend with your kids.  So more the number of kids that you have, more is the division of these 4 hours of you by the number of kids.  This directly relates to Student to teacher ratio in a school.  If you would want to admit your kid in a school with better student to teacher ratio, then you should also ensure that you start from your home with good and quality time allocation to your kids.  Every kid needs your time and attention...plus you can't forget your wife who would also need her "ME TIME"
  2. I would like to do justification to each of my kid with respect to education and upbringing. These are directly related to the economies of scale where I would want to have more spend ability per kid rather than having too many kids and trying to balance my expenditure between them and still fighting to survive and meet their basic expenditures.  That mean with the limited income that one would have there is a need to do justice to ownself by helping oneself with limited commitments and liabilities.
  3. I would want to provide them their own space and their own independence by reducing the unrequired crowd at home. More the number of kids, more chaotic it could be and no one would get own time and space.  So the limit...
Though there had been another pointer by him that in US more kids mean more rebate in the income tax, but to counter that, the question that comes in - "How much do you save per kid from your income tax?" At the end, expenses for a kid are always more than what Income Tax rebate that you get. There has to be a proper balance between the money you can save v/s the expenditure that you would have towards the upbringing of the kid.

He seems to have bought my points and stated I do this article to have a wider debate on pros and cons of having too few or too many kids....


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