This is not going to be an article about religion, not directly at least. What I wanted to do was something around a hybrid social science called demographic anthropology, which looks at the dynamics between culture and population issues—for example, what’s behind people’s decisions around family size.

I’m doing this article partly to ease the tensions around debates on the reproductive health bill in Congress, sometimes based on an oversimplified view of couples as being either pro- or anti-childbirth. In the real world, reproductive decisions aren’t simple. Couples have been known to start out wanting many children, and then deciding, after the first or second child, that it’s time to stop. On the other hand, there are couples who may have wanted only two children, but decide to keep going because both children are boys, or girls, and they want to balance the gender ratio.

I do wish we’d revive research, popular in the 1970s and 1980s, on the value of children, i.e., how people look at children. Here again, it’s not a matter of being pro- or anti-child but of a difference in looking at the value of a child. In agrarian societies, each child is seen as an extra hand that will help in farm chores as well as caring for the younger siblings and, later, as caregivers for the elderly. In more urbanized and industrialized societies, the emphasis shifts to having fewer children because both parents often end up in the labor force. In these societies, parents are horrified by the idea of a working child, even if for light labor. Childhood was transformed, in industrial societies, into a time of play, of fun and of learning.

Success stories

Ask a peasant couple why they have children, and they’re not likely give you an answer like “old age insurance” or “laborers for agriculture.” Instead, they go into long stories about their families, and those of the neighbors. Often enough, there will be success stories, of how Mang Ambo and Aling Pinang scraped and saved and were able to raise 13 children, “sa awa ng Diyos” (by God’s mercy), selling their last pig to get all their children through school, and now, look, 10 of them are working abroad and sending money home.

Generally, Filipinos will not complain about having too many children. What they do complain about is the cost of raising children, often expressed in terms of the cost of infant milk. Later it’s the cost of schooling; even for public school students, the costs of supplies, transportation and food can run high relative to incomes.

Filipinos do think of parenting as an investment. You hear the term “makabawi” (recover costs) as a child finishes high school or college. The idea is that the child will be entering the labor force soon, and can now help to augment the family income.

Until that happens though, there are always very real fears of disruptions, including the child getting pregnant. It’s not so much the morality of it all than of investments lost: Not only is it an opportunity cost (the child not being able to work and bring home money) but of extra expenses with the unexpected grandchild. Of course, the accidental grandparents will smile through it all, in public at least, shaking their heads about impulsive youth and wishing they waited a bit longer before starting a family.

The perceived costs of parenting (and grandparenting) might, ironically, contribute to larger families. This is because many Filipinos believe that the childrearing costs per child decrease with each succeeding offspring, with the crib, diapers, baby clothes, milk bottles, easily recycled. Even costs in terms of parental time also seem to be reduced with each child, partly because, one parent explained to me, monitoring a brood of six or seven children still involves the same two eyes, the same two hands as you use for one child.

To which I retort: Why is it that watching one child often makes me feel like wishing I had four hands and four eyes, two at the back of my head?

Seriously, Filipinos do rely as well on older children helping to watch the younger ones, and in many families, the responsibilities can be quite heavy. This is not limited to poor families—in this age of the overseas Filipino, I know of families where a teenaged “ate” (elder sister) or “kuya” (elder brother) may sometimes be thrust with the responsibilities of a father or mother in terms of caring for younger siblings.

On a light note, I once met someone who had five sons and when he told me, I was aghast. “How do you manage?” I asked him. “I have one son and there are times when I want to strangle him?” He laughed, and said: “When you have five sons, they take care of strangling each other.”

All said, the success of this mobilization of siblings is still going to depend on a right “configuration.” Having several children one after another will still be a major challenge for child rearing (not to mention the health of the mother). You can’t have a five-year-old child caring for siblings aged a year apart. I’m not writing this hypothetically: Remember the fire two or three years ago in an urban community, where several young siblings died when their house burned down? They were left alone in their shanty, their parents having been hauled to the police station on drug pushing charges.

Collective costs

What I find missing in many of the local discussions around optimum family size is the almost total lack of reference to “collective costs” for the community, if not the entire nation. The dominant view is still: “If a couple can afford to have 10 children, by all means, let them have 10 children.” A long-term view of a sustainable environment thinks of what those 10 children might mean not just for the couple but for the country, now and in the future. Politicians are beginning to recognize this, realizing that there will never be enough resources for a constituency with a large young population, and the gaps are growing all too rapidly.

I have one last angle that we might want to explore: Having more children, having more Filipinos, may actually become counter-productive in terms of “efficiency.” I’m not surprised to read that our labor productivity is one of the lowest in the region—we just have too many people working on subsistence wages, with little incentive for industry or innovation. Just watch those tiny stores crammed with clerks, restaurants with an army of waiters, or homes that hire several helpers.

There’s that Western saying about too many cooks spoiling the broth. Recently I learned a variation, this one from China, which is a bit more graphic. It refers to the way people used to carry water back from the well, using a pole that one put on a shoulder, and water pails. Here’s the little story: One monk uses his pole to carry two pails of water together, while two monks use one pole to carry one pail. Three monks? They’ll all wait for the other to carry the pail. There’s a bit of demographic anthropology in that story, with lessons for families, communities and nations.