The family and today’s challenges

WE are right in the midst of the happy Christmas season when the family plays a very crucial role in everyone’s life. It’s time to look again into the current challenges of this most natural, most basic and most indispensable social unit, since on it hangs much of the fate of our lives.

Definitely we cannot be blind to the many challenges and difficulties that the contemporary family faces. The number of broken and dysfunctional families is increasing. Its nature, purpose and requirements are getting vaguer and vaguer to many people, especially the young.

Many developments today, while offering some good, are also wreaking havoc on the family because they are not understood well nor assimilated properly to the needs of the family. There’s so much concern for the economic viability of the family at the expense of taking care of its spiritual and moral vitality which is more important.

There are many absentee parents. They often delegate their parenthood to others. Besides, parenthood is many times restricted to the act of begetting children alone, without the necessary complementing duty of bringing up children properly. Many do not know anymore what it is to be truly a parent.

Quite often, the parental responsibilities are confined to the material and temporal needs of the family. There can be an overdrive of the emotional side of family life, which to a certain extent is good, but the spiritual and moral upbringing of the children is often untouched.

In fact, that the family is a domestic church remains at best a theory. It is more commonly ignored and not understood, its practical implications unknown to many. That it is in the family where faith, hope and charity ought to be nourished, where the art of prayer and the development of virtues are taught and pursued, is hardly felt by many.

We need to strengthen the family, and within the family, the institution of marriage, because it is what keeps the family alive and healthy. Parents and the other elders in the family should realize that more than attending to the material needs of the family members, it is the spiritual and moral needs that should be given priority.

This is the primary duty of the parents, before it becomes a duty of the teachers, priests, nuns, and other officials and personages involved in the continuing education of children and people in general.

Parents therefore have to be properly trained for this grave responsibility. They have to feel more urgently the need for the appropriate formation. They need to know the intricacies of spirituality and morality involved in the different stages of the growth of the family members.

Let’s always remember that the education of children always starts at home within the family atmosphere. The parents are the primary teachers and the home is the first school. Schools play only a subsidiary role.

Let’s hope that more and more parents realize this. We cannot deny that many parents think that the education of their children is mainly the responsibility of schools, teachers, tutors, and other specialists. We have to explode that myth.

That’s why parents should first of all realize very deeply that they themselves need a good and ongoing human and spiritual formation. Let’s remember that this aspect of formation serves as the foundation for any education and training children receive.