CHARMAIN NAIDOO: How many children is too many? Four? Twenty-three?
'Research shows that it costs around R90,000 a year to raise a child – that is with no inflation or growth'
Four children, my mother used to say, is the perfect number. She’d point to her ladder of children – boy, girl, boy, girl, all two years apart, and sigh: Perfect Pigeon Pairs. Perfectly Perfect. My devoutly Catholic mother often talked, wistfully I thought, of her restraint at not popping out more children. She cited examples of Catholic Irish families where it was not unusual to have a brood of a dozen or more children. How wonderful, my mother would enthuse, to have a house filled with the laughter of children. It’s a great way to learn how to share she’d say, an admonishment of the four of us for wanting to keep what was ours, ours. It was always a mystery to me as to why my mother wished she’d had more children. She barely coped with four. She was an anxious mother, fearful. She hated mess, and a messy house is standard with small children. She was useless in a crisis. Like the time Anton and Shaun and I put our little sister Antonette into a homemade go-cart and pushed her down...
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