Column

Listening to a group of pre-teens playing togetherin the compound of their home, I could not help wondering if this was
a privilege only a few children enjoyed in the 21st century.

Most children today are single kids, at least in middle class, upwardly mobile, urban, nuclear families, or at best one of two. Thanks to both social criteria and awareness, families have necessarily become smaller.

This, of course, means that children have to seek their playmates outside the home, among school mates or peers in the co-op or colony.

Nothing wrong with that, except the impermanence
of it. School friends can go away, or fail a class, ditto colony friends, whose parents can decide to move, or worse still disapprove of the friends their child brings home.

On the other hand, having five or six siblings can make for a universe that is almost self contained in its needs for the many emotional and social experiences that are an integral part of growing up.

From admiration and hero worship to jealousy and anger, siblings run the whole gamut of emotions towards one another, and the best thing perhaps is the fact that these are ever changing as relationships shift and morph and change with the growing up process.

And even better is the fact that the group has its own
inbuilt fun times module… holidays and play times are often self sufficient, and the boys can play rough while the girls play at their games, and if often the roles are reversed, or the groups break to form new ones, no one cares too much. It’s all part of the family scenario, as long as they take care of one another.

It makes me wonder if joint families had, along with their attendant problems of course, a definite advantage held out to children.
Of providing a ground in which they could learn not just networking and bargaining skills, but those of mutual adjustment and give and take.

Skills which many children fail to learn today, thanks
to lack of exposure or mentors to show them the way. And the lack of which leads to serious interpersonal conflicts, both at the work place and in the home, as adults.

Of course a large family is no guarantee of perfect relationships. After all each one is unique and individual, and seeks his own universe.

But, listening to the boys playing some intricate game of their own making, I could not but momentarily wish I had grown up among seven or eight siblings instead of the lone sister, with whom I staged my moments of play as well as my pitched life-and-death battles!