When one is suffering from great pain in the heart and preferring to be dead than alive, it is the End of the World. When we lose sight of the moral values, our life will be of great suffering. When there is absence of loving kindness between parents and children, and the sense of duties and obligation between husband and wife, the world will be endowed with disasters and great sufferings.

 

During a parents-teachers meeting session, a student of about sever years old was invited to share his understanding of his studies after he was exposed to Di Zi Gui, a Chinese classic on morality and human values. The student revealed that he realized that he needs to have filial piety to be good human beings after he started his studies. He continued to disclose that before that, he thought frequently of how to get rid of his parents because his parents were bothersome to him. His mother who was happily listening to him was shocked and surprised to hear this and was tearing. She must be thinking that she had never expected her son, aged seven, would be thinking of getting rid of her. In actual fact, as parents nowadays, do we know what our children are thinking; what they are saying; what they are doing; what their benchmarks in life are? We may not be aware at all due to the lack of communication with our children.

 

Why would a boy of seven years old be thinking of getting rid of his parents? The only explanation is that there is a lack of loving kindness between the parents and child. Our children of one or two years of age would still be coming back to us after they were lectured for their mistakes. It is the human instinct in them to seek protection and love from their parents. When a baby was born, it is the instinct in the parents to give love and protection to the helpless fragile baby. The parents would not be thinking of the wealth and properties this baby will reward them when he grows up. The only thought in the parents' mind is to ensure the baby grows up healthily, and to become good and useful human being. The seeking for parental love and care by the child and the giving of unconditional loving kindness by the parents to the child is human nature. If it is human nature, why then do we have so many cases of children rebelling against their parents, fighting and even killing their parents? 

 

The cause of today's problems with our children is that the parents do not fulfill their duties and responsibilities to educate their children. Some of the elderly may argue that they were not taught to have filial piety by their parents and yet they were filial to them. Actually, the teaching in the past was by way of role model and not by words of mouth, and the whole society was very focused on creating the filial piety values. Nowadays, not only were the parents not being a role model to their children, but the society is disseminating information that helps to instill the idea of killings, stealing, sexual misconduct and wondering thoughts. Under such circumstances, our children are falling fast into the deep valley of lust and delusion. George Santayana once said "A child educated only at school is an uneducated child".  

 

Nowadays, working parents are faced with the following challenges:

 

    * Use of maids - Most of today's parents have to work to improve their household incomes and have to leave their children with the maids. To keep their job, the maids would do everything to serve the junior master like an emperor so that the junior master would not complain about them. Under such circumstances, the children would grow up to be totally dependent on the maid and would lose even the most basic survival skills like wearing his shoes and shocks.

    * Use of grandparents - Some would employ their parents instead of maids to look after their children. If our parents are not aligned with us in the correct approach in the up bringing of their grand children, then the grand children would learn to get away with anything under the love of the grand parents. Employing our own parents to look after our children is a much better option compared to use of maids. We just need to be careful and align with our parents on the correct approach so that our parents would not love their grand children without wisdom.

    * Unrestricted use of television and computers - The greatest monsters today are the television and the computer. Our children can be glued to the computer for hours playing games, and worst still, surfing undesirable websites. Uncontrolled and unrestricted use of television and computers will have a grave and undesirable consequence in a healthy development of our children. Proper supervision is needed on the use of television and computer.

    * Learning too many trades - Some parents are busy earning money and have very little time with their children. Not only that, they arranged all the programs to fill up all available time of their children, such as learning dancing, piano, arts, language, tuition, etc. The pressure is exerted on the children to excel not only in class but in all other trades as well. The parents merely impose what they want on their children without even a thought of what their children want and are capable of. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising to find that children not only are not grateful to their parents but hate them for their "sufferings".

 

We only have one chance to do it right with our children. Use our loving kindness to nurture and develop our children so that they know how to respect parents, elders and others. When they grow up, they will be able to love and care for others and make this world a much a happier place for all.

 

Ng Kim Siang

He is a Systems Analyst by profession and has spent a large part of his career managing large technology projects in the Banking industry. He holds a Master in Business Administration from the University of Bath UK and is currently pursuing a Diploma on Pre-School Educator Course.