Changing home culture

A BELIEF is floating around that says children today are ruder, more ignorant, and generally less respectful of their elders than they were before. In school, teachers are struggling with our students more than ever because the behavior of children appears to have worsened. What can you say of this? Could it really be that teachers are failing in the aspect of teaching children well?

Faculty members in the academe view the matter differently. They point to the necessity of both parents nowadays to work in order to pull the family up as one great factor why children at present are lacking in good manners. Most children of working parents are entrusted to nannies or relatives whose authorities are sometimes undermined by children.

Majority of mothers during the pre-electronic age were home managers; they looked after the kids and tended the entire family while the father worked. Today however, in an economic environment characterized by high prices, parents are left with no option but to leave their children and find work if only to make both ends meet. The so-called purchasing power of the peso is not one that brings parents with even a few number of kids to a “comfort zone”. Already, a significant number of mothers opted to get themselves employed overseas because of a better pay scale. Soon all mothers will leave their kids to look for a better pay somewhere. If this happens, we will have more children deprived of genuine maternal care and devoid of desirable traits.

Parental absence can foster rebellious attitude and problematic behaviors in children. This contributes to teachers’ prevailing predicament in the academe, especially in public schools. Yet ironically, parents often talk about the behavior of younger generation as if they didn’t have anything to do with it.

Apparently we are facing a radical change in culture. Parents are the second generation of the philosophy that says parents have rights and the teachers have responsibilities. Teaching job has become much more demanding. We expect teachers to personalize learning rather than teaching everyone in the same mould; we expect them to take over the functions of family. In fact, some parents delegate their parental responsibility to teachers. The erosion of parental responsibility and has added a great deal of difficulty to the vast work load of teachers.

Teachers are working hard and those who demean teachers do a disservice to teaching by belittling their difficulties. Next time something goes wrong, don’t blame it all to teachers. Social ills that result from problematic behaviors are not created by teachers but deal with them every day. I am not saying parents are solely to be blamed. Social ills can also be symptoms of larger systemic problems. But no matter what dimension we try to see things there is always a need to engage parents so as to keep children undistracted by misguided peers. Every child needs the support of home to complement pro-active mentoring by teachers. The school alone cannot succeed in compensating for the disparity. Changing home culture is the most important thing that could be done to develop good values in children and make them in keeping with our expectations.