Illustration: Chen Xia/GT

With a comprehensive package of reforms unveiled upon the closure of the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee last week, the easing of the one-child policy - one of the highlights of the reform plan - has undoubtedly become the most talked-about topic among urban Chinese families.

The new policy allows couples where one parent is an only child to have two children, a relaxation of the current family planning policy, under which both the parents must come from one-child families to be qualified to have a second child in most Chinese cities.

Although Shanghai's family planning authority said on Sunday that it may take six to 12 months to implement this new rule in response to the flexible timetable set by the Chinese central government, thousands of Shanghai couples who are eligible under the relaxed policy have begun to weigh up the costs and benefits of having another child.

My husband and I are one such couple. My husband comes from a big family in North China and has two siblings, while I, a Shanghai native, am an only child. We had our son more than a year ago and have since lived busily and happily until the announcement of the revised family planning policy forced us to reconsider our future.

When we first came to learn the news, we were both cheerful as the new rule will grant us more freedom and options to plan and build our family. Besides, my husband and I, both of who grew up with our siblings or cousins, have always wanted our son to have a childhood playmate so that he won't spend his early years feeling lonesome.

However, the momentary joy of imagining a new baby in our family was soon overwhelmed by remembering the constant struggle of raising and supporting our son from the very first day he was born to all those future years to come. Not to mention the huge financial burden that an extra child would bring to us.

Thinking of all those sleepless nights of babysitting and hectic days of working that we've been through over the past 12 months has unsurprisingly prompted my husband and I to drop the idea of having a second child. But we know that we're not alone in making this hard decision.

Shanghai has around 2 million couples in which both husband and wife are from a one-child family and thus are qualified under the current policy to have two children, according to figures from the Shanghai Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission. However, only around 13,000 couples have applied to have a second child in the past five years and only 7,000 of them actually carried out their plans and had another baby.

Some major reasons behind this declining demographic trend are reportedly the waning reproductive desires among today's young couples in Shanghai, the soaring cost of raising children in big cities, and growing competition in the workplace.

Nevertheless, there are undeniable gains and benefits to having more than one child in a family. A colleague with a single child recently told us that when she and her brother took turns nursing their ailing mother for days and nights, it changed her perspective of having children. Whereas she was once happy choosing a DINK (double income, no kids) family, she later saw the value of having offspring to care for her in her old age.

Although her story was convincing enough to make me once again weigh up the pros and cons of a second child, I'm pretty sure that my husband and I aren't going to have another baby, at least, not in the foreseeable future.