Family, Work, and Social Policy Paper - Essay Example

At the 3rd grade, my father was forced to give up schooling and assist my grandfather with the farm work. However, the younger of his siblings got a chance to continue with education since the combined effort of my father and grandfather at the farm produced enough to sustain them. My mother’s parents divorced when she was still young, at the age of 6 and was brought u by my grandmother alone. She however managed to go through schooling and ended up as a teacher. My parents got married when they were in their early 20s.

Lack of education for my father and unwillingness of my mother to educate him on family planning meant that births kept coming every other year, ending up with fifteen of us. There is a great connection between the choices made by one generation to the next. Since my grandfather was just a farmer, my father happened to become a farmer by default, since he was introduced to it at a tender age. It is the only thing he knows how to do best. Though he grew in poverty, he managed to advance in farming, eventually becoming one of the greatest farmers of his time.

By the time he got married to my mother, he had accumulated sufficient resources to afford his family a decent lifestyle. With my mother as a teacher and my father illiterate, the pressure for all of us to attend school and perform was enormous. No wonder then that most of us in our family have gone up to college level. Looking back at the toiling my grandparents and my parents went through in order to raise their families and fend for them, I am always motivated to work very hard at school, so that I can have a different lifestyle from that of them.

The fact that my parents got married at their early 20s could have contributed to their having so many children, since they felt still young, even when they had ten children already. This could have been the reason why they kept having children, until we numbered fifteen. The pressure to bring up fifteen kids, who were barely spaced by two years, caused my mother to resign from her work as a teacher and remain home to look after her kids. The number of children in our nuclear is so large. These two aspects of our nuclear family have made me come up with decisions in contrary to my parents.

I will only want to marry at an advanced age of late 20s or at thirty. I will want to maintain a lean family, which does not exceed 3 kids. There are many government and social policies that have impacted in our families variously. The government subsidy program to farmers, distributing between $10 to $ 30 million dollars to farmers has greatly benefited us as a family (Thompson, 17). The government went a long way in subsidizing for the key farm inputs and other equipment necessary for farm work.

This greatly assisted the farming career of my father, since it provided him access to cheap farm inputs, machinery and other equipments, which would otherwise be unaffordable to him without the government subsidy. Notable of these programs is he ‘Direct Payment’ subsidy policy, which requires that farmers involved in the production of a certain range of crops get paid for the acreage they are farming (Thompson, 42). Since my father was a wheat farmer, this enabled him to receive the payment, which in turn played a major role in supporting our family financially. The