Wednesday, September 24, 2008 Editorials: ‘Challenged’ Pinoy family
THIS week has been designated Family Week per Presidential Decree 60 issued more than a decade ago declaring every last week of September for the purpose.
Significantly, it is further “supported by Presidential Proclamation 487 fittingly declaring the fourth Sunday of September as Family Thanksgiving Day,” to start off the week.
Sadly, while the family as a social unit is universally accepted by all civilized societies in modern times, it seems today the most taken for granted and the least valued.
By tradition, the family is a tight social unit identified by social scientists as a front line defense against all sorts of adversity, a secured “fall back position” for those in distress.
Still, it appears to be the most depreciated now, the most devalued notion of human ties, in terms of personal respect and emotional relationship.
What was most closely knit before appears loose and breached with debilitating influences that have steadily eroded the kinship that binds family members together.
Never has the family today been threatened by its environment.
Problems
Truth to tell, many of our people consider the family now as a worrisome factor in our achieving a satisfying life.
Social and economic observers are claiming the Filipino family has become victim of moral neglect, social indulgence,
demeaning indiscipline.
The problems of drug addiction, unwanted pregnancy, broken marriages, and the rise of socially challenged children are symptomatic of a social ailment that do not augur well of a modern republic’s economic and social development.
Indeed, the state of our nation’s political and economic circumstances today clearly betrays a social condition that demands immediate strengthening of its social structures and moral outlook.
Dependence
The dynamics of a developing society essentially evolves from the cultural, moral, and emotional context of the community’s inhabitants.
And at the heart of the community’s life is the integral blood kinship of the individuals that are tightly bonded together to form the family.
Thus, the strength or weakness of the community is dependent upon the strength or weakness of the individual family.
Hence, as it is of the community, so is it of the nation.
