- Rudolph BrownWe are left with nothing good to feed ourselves.
Sonia Morgan, Staff Reporter
THE DINING table is empty. Dad's not here yet and mom has some left-over rice and chicken in the microwave. That's her meal. John stopped at Burger King on his way home just in case there's no dinner. Michelle sits on the couch and watches Felicity while she eats a bag of potato chips.
We have moved from the table to the couch; from family time to television and telephone. From community parenting to individual parenting. Miss Maud or Mass Joe doesn't have the right to discipline your kids oops, your children anymore.
Like leftover food, the values of yesteryear are tasteless in the mouths of the young.
No one has the time to teach them, and they gather mildew while, in the vacuum of their empty stomachs, the young develop values of their own. They like fast food. They like life in the fast lane. Full stop. Values reflect a growing culture of "get it now".
Like the pre-packed one-person meal they collect at Burger King and Kentucky, life becomes, for them, an individual serving. Forget about sharing, about passing the platter. Forget about the joy of eating, of doing things together.
This week, we make an analogy between the abandoned tradition of daily dining and the disappearance of core values. In our discussions with mental health professionals, business leaders and family counsellors, we discover that, like the fast food that the young now prefer, the values they now espouse are not likely to be ones that will satisfy their deepest needs.
Life is cheap in the hustle for material things. Between January 1 and October 30, 2001, 940 persons died violently. Blood in the streets is nothing new for children. And the primitive has been bombarded with bloodshed and massacre something has to give.
The crime problem is something bigger than poverty. "If poverty were the only cause of crime then the poorest country in the world would have the highest crime rate not so. It is one of the contributing factors, but there is the issue of low self-esteem," says Anthony Change, president of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce.
"What are our moral standards as a society?" he asks. "And, if they are lacking we need to build some," Mr. Chang adds. Dr. Roslyn Douglas, counsellor and assistant pastor of Christian Fellowship World Outreach, says the moral degradation in our society has much to do with the "breakdown of principle we can't blame the younger generation for all of it." She says some of it is coming from the adults Children watch and imitate you. She recalls watching the behaviour of some of the parents and understanding why the children behave the way they do. The family needs to return to centre, and we dare say with the prayers, well-balanced meals, and the ritual of manners and caring that came at the table at the start and end of each day. Back to basics is where we should go.
FAST FOOD, FAST LANE
PAT EVES, counsellor with Family Life Ministries, is cuttingly succinct in her assessment of the direction in which the wind of values is blowing today. "Values in the '50s are now seen as outdated. And the children of the '50s became the parents of the '70s and have raised their children with a whole new set of values."
It's life in the fast lane. It's fast food, and even 'faster' manners. The oldsters would describe youngsters today as too 'fast.' "We got into the fast lane," says Pat Eves. "We became interested in things more than people and we started to behave like a large industrial country," she adds.
Now we have students taking weapons to school and respect for elders is a rare thing. The general belief is that it is all about 'me'. There is no sharing anymore. Crime is escalating, blood and gore have become the norm. In fact, when we look at what is the norm in Jamaica, it is frightening.
We can blame the government. We can blame North American influences, we can blame the absentee fathers and 'sperm donors' who have left their children to suffer and we can even blame those careless mothers whose children support them by wiping windshields at the stoplights. But have we ever stopped to find out how we got here?
Says Pat Eves, "We pull from 'foreign' without checking to see if what we adopt is compatible with our culture. For example we no longer discipline our children and we give them enough rope to hang themselves. Children who grew up in the '50s parents were too strict: now they become parents in the '70s and '80s and have just let loose the children. They say they don't want to make the same mistakes their parents made and therefore they end up going to the other extreme."
A serving of values
You might not be able to give them everything they want from the supermarket shelves. But where values are concerned, you have more than enough with which to make a balanced serving.
There is a delicate balance which the parent has to strike between suffocating the child and giving too much leeway. "At all times children must be cognisant that the parent is the adult."
"Children need role models, stable parenting and guidelines to follow and they expect that," says Ms. Eves. She says, however, if they are not given boundaries, they will challenge the parents to see just how far they can go and just how much they can get away with.
"When some parents behave like pals with their children the lines are blurred and the respect might break down." Mimicking of the North American behaviour has in some cases diminished the level of responsibility with which children speak to their parents. However, she says "adults just forgot to be the right role models and our behaviour is not consistent with our talk children pick up hypocrisy they know fakes and the know how to model it."
The environment will have an impact on people. The extended family is sometimes absent therefore we have gotten to a stage where everyone has to take responsibility for himself or herself. "The house is not big enough for the extended family. People have moved out of family homes to start their own units. They move far away from the parents so that you don't have to have them meddle in your affairs," the counsellor states.
However, at the other end of the scale. "The oneroom and the small spaces if that is not properly monitored, can cause chaos. If the mother is entertaining a visiting partner they (the children) have to stay outside until this man leaves." While they are outside, there is no telling what they might be up to, Ms Eves explains.
Even the way in which people speak to their children has its effects. The language of love is not being cultivated, Ms Eves says. The harsh language in many households influences children to behave in the same manner when they are at school. Sometimes "people look at each other as the reason they are not prospering".
