Family’s crucial role in child’s education
We need to alert families, especially those with young children, of their crucial role in the delicate task of educating their children. Nowadays, with all the confusion in society and in the world, this responsibility acquires greater significance.
We have to constantly remind parents that they are the primary educators of their children. Schools are meant to assist them only. Parents are not simply begetters or procreators of children. They need to bring them up to be good children, responsible citizens of the country and faithful children of the Church.
Parents today should be up to the complex challenges children are facing in their education. Not only are there more factors to reckon with. These factors often compete with each other and can have multiple effects, some good, some bad. Parents have to be keenly discerning to handle these factors expertly.
In the first place, parents have to create a conducive family atmosphere, where the children can grow up with as much ease and comfort as possible. Problems and difficulties, both minor and major, will always be around, but parents precisely have to find a way of making a homey environment for the kids.
Priorities have to be clear in their minds. While work and income are important, spending time with the children is even more required of them if they want to be good parents. Children need the physical presence or bonding with parents to get that direction-setting toehold in their lifelong formation.
What children see and hear at home becomes their basic resource engine to drive them through life, their primal pool of values that would guide them in the world. It’s in the home where their fundamental character and attitudes to different things are formed.
Whether children become men and women of character, with the proper hierarchy of values and virtues, knowing what is truly right and wrong, what freedom is, how to use time and money properly, etc., depends on how they are brought up in the family more than anywhere else.
Parents, therefore, should make their family their priority in life. It’s there, before anything else, where they can prove their true faith and love for God and others. Failing in this, all their successes in other fields would fall hollow.
Crucial in this task is for parents to strike the proper blend between parental authority and tenderness, discipline and understanding, effective family management and boundless flexibility and patience.
Parents have to be both parents and friends to their children. This difficult combination can be made easy if the love the reigns in the family is the true love that comes from God. Otherwise, many possible distortions can spoil the parents-children relationship.
Parents have to understand that they are the first representative of God to their children. They have to understand that their authority over their offspring is a participation of the fatherhood of God over all of us. It would be good for parents to chew over this truth often to come out with practical resolutions daily.
That parental authority has to exercised according to the mind and will of God. For certain, it will be played out on the bumpy road of freedom all of us have to pass. It will require both strong and gentle means to attain its proper goal.
More than anything else, what parents can do first as educators to their children is to give good example. This duty cannot be waived. Parents have to be the first to show example of personal hygiene, order, courtesy, and all the other virtues.
They have to continually support their example with the appropriate and prompt explanations, the whys and the wherefores of the things they are imparting to their children.
These days, what children need most is to appreciate the objective value of study, prayer, constant concern for one another. The environment today is filled with comfort and pleasure-seeking ways, indifference to God and spiritual realities, self-absorption.
Also, parents should be competent in showing and explaining the importance of purity and sobriety, since these are the virtues continually threatened by the errant culture in the world these days.
The families today are especially challenged to do something to correct this trend that is undermining the true health of humanity.
Lastly, parents should not shirk from the responsibility of teaching their children about the ultimate truths—God, morality, vocation, continuing formation, etc. This is an integral part of their duties towards their children.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)
