The situation of
our children, with the abuse scandals that are all around and coupled with the
teenage gang culture, which is plaguing our cities, everything appears out of
control.
Young people today
are having to go outside the family to organisations for help in their times of
severe trouble and unrest.
Schools are
offering counselling much of which is dire, as these so called counsellors are
not doing their job effectively enough, because they do not have the experience
to give those who are in turmoil in ever increasing numbers, some kind of a
direction to ease their suffering.
Much of the
suffering is on the home front, where parents who have their own problems and
their own agendas inflict these on the children whose lives they are meant to
protect.
Many parents are
psychologically damaged from their own parents and so learnt behaviour is often
passed on. Their children then begin to
suffer at the hands of these parents and so the cycle continues until therapy
finally sorts one or all of them out and harmony in the family home begins to
stabilise.
An alcoholic parent
will often teach the child unwittingly that severe drinking is acceptable,
coupled with the behavioural problems that go with it. The child begins to grow up in an environment
of unrest and severe upheaval, not knowing who to turn to and who can help them
to be released from this daily abusive situation.
A parent sometimes
has behavioural problems and is dictatorial and changeable to the extent that
the child does not know from one minute to the next what is normal about that
parent and what is not. In the confusion
of a topsy-turvy home life, the child’s confusion exacerbates until they do not
know how to behave as they are unsettled in an unsettled atmosphere.
This then forms a situation where the
child to secure a kind of sanity becomes withdrawn and quiet, the parents never
realising there is anything wrong with the child, as they have their own sets
of problems to deal with, which they often fail to recognise in themselves and
therefore are not able to recognise them in their own children.
Abuse, whether it is sexual or emotional
in families, is rife. The sexual act is
usually caused by the father onto the daughter or the grandfather onto the
granddaughter. The child is instructed
that the adult loves them and this is their little secret and nothing must be
said. The child has to suffer the abuse
until it is of an age that they feel they can start to fight back. All that time suffering in silence, their
world shattered for all time.
Often it is known, but overlooked and this
is the irresponsibility of parents within the family home, where the home is
supposed to be a safe haven. In many
cases it is a constant battle ground.
Love and understanding within the family
home is in very short supply these days, as the parents have to work primarily
to keep a roof over their heads and of their children also.
Parents don’t have the time or in many
cases the inclination to love their children, so this is where the children go
out of the home seeking love and affection, another kind of family. This is where the various gang cultures stem
from, where loyalty to the surrogate family takes them in and cares for them,
but for a price.
The children of the gangs have a unity,
which was not there in the family home and where they are listened to and help
within that support group is often given.
Home life now is not what it used to be
and parents now have to see the kind of society they indirectly have bred and
have brought upon themselves, where we have failed our children in so many
ways.
We must start to repair the damage and to
instruct on what is right and wrong. Old
fashion principles and laws within the family unit will need to go back to
basics, where all start to talk to one another and where grievances are
expressed and put right, so we are able to teach our children that love exists
in the home and that the boundaries are there for all, not only the children to
live and work by.
If we as parents cannot demonstrate by our
own actions, we cannot expect our children to do the same. They must learn by these examples that to
behave well is acceptable and to behave badly simply is not.
We have all been complacent by allowing
our children to watch the soaps on television, where the characters exploit one
another with serious bad language and behaviour. We have accepted this as being alright and,
as a result, bad behaviour is all around us.
We, as a nation, have lost respect for one another and we now reap this
lackadaisical attitude every day.
Our children are being abused right, left
and centre and we, the parents, sit back and think somebody else should do our
work for us. It is our responsibility to
act as responsible loving parents or we reap what we sow.
Look at the world today with the amount of
paedophiles, sexual predators and psychologically damaged people that are out
there and nobody has been there to save them.
Isn’t it time we did?
Jenny Ayers
Tuesday, 30th October 2012
