The Child and Rural Family Life Life in Zambia's rural areas comes with its own diverse challenges and opportunities. These challenges and opportunities are faced by both children and adults.When we focus on the children we discover that they face many challenges specific to them, challenges for which their adult parents have at times few answers. It is often thought that new technological developments such as IT innovations simply by-pass the rural child, but nothing can be further from the truth. Communication technologies such as television, radio and cellphones  are themselves self-popularizing and self advertising. It only takes one or two people to introduce any device into the relatively tight knit rural settlements to have every other person wanting to own or use the device. Chlidren are not exempt from this desire for advacement and modernlty, they too have perhaps even stronger desires to own or utilise the modern gadgets. The same applies to the wish to flow with the latest fashion trends or to use the more urbanite slang words. Human beings will desire what other human beings possess  regardless of where they live, this also applies to the children. When governments and civil society groups plan for rural settlers it is important for them to see that most, if not all, rural societies want much of what they see as the advantages of living in the city. They may love their land and the independent, self reliance of rural living but they do also desire an easier life. With this desire to modernise and belong, rural children will seek to get an education so they can aquire the qualifications that facilitate entrance into city life. They work with their parents from an early age to raise money for their schooling in much the same fashion as children living in the high density areas of the city. Some children will walk around selling foodstuffs or they will help their mothers sell at the local market. This is often necessary due to the shortage of adult labour in many families. The children also help in other household chores such as drawing water and fetching cooking fuels such as charcoal or firewood. The scarcity of adult labour in rural families is a fact easily missed when discussing rural child labour issues in Africa or Zambia in particular. In many homes there are simply too few adults to do the housework. Many modern African rural families are just as small as city families with still many more being single parent arrangements. Gone are the days when people rotinely had more than four or five children. In cases where the family numbers are higher, there is a significant amount of mobility with many teenage and young adults leaving the family homes to seek their fortunes in the city. It follows logic that increased rural to urban drift implies higher mobility among teens and young adults migrating from rural homes to the city. The male youth will journey to seek jobs in the industries and their female counterparts will travel out to seek jobs in hair salons, shops or to work as domestic help. This mobility of the teen and young adults leaves much of the house work to the younger children resulting in unavoidably high levels of child labour. Children lliving in rural Zambia and Africa at large still enjoy some of the ancient past times that have always occupied the youmg when not at work.Where there are lakes, rivers or streams the children will swim if allowed by parents and considered safe. Other children will swim regardless of danger or parental prohibition. In the more forested areas, the children will hike in the bushes hunting birds, bush mice or finding fruit in season. Much of the time the smaller ones remain at home but at times they may be allowed to follow the older children at play. Those in the urbanised centres such as Provincial capitals pass their leasure time playing at all the same games as city children; games such as soccer are very popular past times. Children will fabricate their own footballs using different methods such as rolled up cloth strips or cloths wrapped around condoms, which they easily buy at local shops. The home life of the rural child can thus be summed up as doing house chores, going to school and engaging in self-supervised play. Their role models will be local civil servants such as police, teachers or medical staff. Their mentors will also include older siblings that migrate to cities to pursue further studies or to do unskilled work of all types. The rural child has very narrow prospects and they straddle a world that demands adult responsibilities even as much as they remain children.