Family and responsibility

School starts today and as usual, I've been getting requests from some of my siblings if I could lend them money to pay school fees, buy books and clothes for their children.

I am not rich but because I have no wife and children, not even a car, I am seen as having money stashed somewhere so I go through this routine everytime the schools open.

One of them, my brother, just had his 7th child and absolutely no idea how he is going to finance the needs of the child. Like I said, I am no parent but the numbers don't lie. This is how much you are going to need to raise a child until they're old enough to earn their own living.

Birth to kindergarten, 5 years, Rm15,000
Kindegarten to Standard 6, 7 years, Rm13,000
Form 1 to Form 6, 6 years, Rm22,000
Diploma or degree, 4 years, Rm50,000

Total: Rm100,000 from age 0 to 22 years old.

7 Children = Rm700,000

This is only for basic education and food expenses, excluding other things. Several times, I did ask why do you have so many children when your earnings can only support two at most? His answer is always the same. First, children are God's gift. You never reject a gift. The more children you have, the more blessed you are. Second, because God gave me this gift, I know he will somehow give me the "rezeki" or divine means to support the children so I need not worry.

I wanted to ask if this "divine means" meant borrowing heavily from me, and in what way is in-family arguments about the lack of money a divine blessing. But I decided not to. Beliefs are hard to change.

Still, things like this tell me one uncomfortable fact about how our problems originate: through self-imposed ignorance. Self-imposed because while we are blessed with a brain, we like to brush aside simple logic in our actions, preferring to cast everything to the powers of the unknown. The real tragedy is when we make other people suffer for our irresponsible actions, even if they are our own children.

While I am not advocating a Godless approach, I don't believe we should ignore the consequences of ignorant behaviour either, such as having 7 children on a salary of Rm3,000 a month, and trying to have the 8th and 9th if possible just because we think the more kids we have, the more God loves us. All I can see arising from it is cold hard suffering, for us and our children as our ability to afford their basic necessities dry up.

Like I said, one of our real blessings is the capacity to think. Use that blessing to make wise decisions. Like a little family planning perhaps. Don't leave everything to the man up there and then go around begging and borrowing.