Two kids and an SUV: Why Kenyan families are shrinking

What informed the Kenyan dream of one spouse, two children, a three-bedroom house, a four-wheel SUV, and the recent addition of a fluffy white dog? I wondered how two children became the standard unit for a middle-class family.

Looking back, our parents in the city lived in single rooms or two-room houses in Nairobi’s Eastlands. Some of these families had two spouses; polygamy was still the norm, even though some people had only one wife. Today, serial monogamy is the norm. People leave their spouses and can marry several other people in the course of their lifetime.

Children were fine with such a living context because most probably they didn’t know friends or close relatives who lived in bigger houses and better neighbourhoods. Even the affluent Kenyans back in the day had four or five children. Not every upwardly mobile family had a car, and those who could afford it squeezed all the backseat of the family car, and all was well. They could also share bedrooms and other amenities in the house, like washrooms. Today, houses are coming with all bedrooms en suite.

There is a Nairobi line where there are Luos classified as “jang’o” and “jeng”. Jang’o is the Luo who speaks Dholuo and Jeng’ is the urbanite Luo who identifies as Luo but cannot speak Luo. The latter hardly visits his rural home. They can count the number of times they visited and most of them were to bury close relatives. This applies to most families from other regions of Kenya. Why did these upwardly mobile Kenyans decide not to take their children with them when visiting their parents?

Two markers of upward mobility are responsible for this shift: the car and private schools for children. Even today, the car you drive will place you in a socio-economic bracket in the eyes of people. The school your children attend is also a statement of your economic power. When families began to buy cars, two children became ideal. The front seat is for the parents, and the back seat is for two children and the house help.

This became real when car seats for children became a common feature in Kenya. This made people consider having only two children. The rationale is to avoid the inconvenience of owning two vehicles or hiring a bigger one whenever the family travels. People may not know why they chose to have only two children.

Many people saw the first lot of children whose parents enjoyed the opportunities that came with Africanization after independence had children. They just had two and that was it. Those who followed thought it looked cool and adopted the trend. They could not imagine that it had to do with the carrying capacity of the affordable cars that were coming out of Japan. Toyota cars became common in Kenya and Africa from the late 1950s to the early 1960s as African countries gained independence.

Very few people could own the cars then. In the 1990s, the IMF and the World Bank pushed Kenya into Structural Adjustment Programmes. One of the changes this brought was the removal of trade restrictions, which led to the importation of second-hand vehicles. This made vehicles affordable to more people. It is also from the 1990s onwards that a two-child family became the norm in Kenya.

Keep Reading

Now, those who had more children and could now own cars and drive down to the village opted not to take the children. They could not all fit at the back, even if they squeezed for the short travels around the city, it was not possible for the whole day trip out of town. This is how their children would later identify with their community back home without a hint of that culture.

Kenya introduced the 8-4-4 education system in 1986. Just like the current CBC, it had teething problems. The upwardly mobile parents opted to take their children to private schools. On the other hand, government funding for education dropped, especially with the mid-1990s SAPS. Middle-class parents did not trust the crowded public schools with the education of their children and so opted to take their children to private schools.

This also made the three-bedroom house a big deal. The children would share one bedroom when young, and the other would be for the live-in house help.

There was a push for family planning from the mid-1980s. However, it was more of spacing than a cap inthe number of children. The African context of many children representing wealth was still at the back of people’s minds.