My Corner for Education

I found this article online yesterday. The writer has good points on parenting issues, which many teachers are not in a position to express to parents. No matter in the East or the West,  people generally blame our society as a whole or criticise the teachers particularly for the declining of education quality. I think it is time for everybody, especially the PARENTS, to reflect on their own responsibility of parenting and family education. Bravo to Ms. Krista Boryskavich! The following is the article from the Sun.


April 19, 2007

 
Parents, not villages, raise kids
  By KRISTA BORYSKAVICH


  Hillary Clinton once said it takes a village to raise a child. But if today's generation of youth is any indication of the level of parenting skills possessed by the proverbial village, it may be time to think about moving.

  A recent Vanier Institute for the Family study concluded that there are more problem children today than there were 50 years ago, and society at large is to blame.

  According to study author Anne-Marie Ambert, a former professor of sociology at York University, it is the laissez-faire "enabling environment" running rampant in today's society that encourages problem children to misbehave.

  In other words, busy (or lazy) parents are offloading their parental responsibilities to teachers, neighbours, television sets and computers, leaving their children without a consistent parental role model.

  And the human parental fill-ins who have an opportunity to introduce order and discipline into the lives of misbehaving children have instead adopted a non-interventionist "not my problem" approach, sometimes with disastrous results.

 Newspaper headlines and television newscasts abound with stories of troubled youths taking part in disruptive behaviour such as fighting and bullying, or committing criminal acts such as theft and vandalism.

 And Internet networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have provided a new forum for young people to misbehave, knowing that the nature of the Internet makes immediate consequences for their actions next to impossible.

  Online survey results released this week by Kids Help Phone found that 70% of teenage respondents have been the victim of on-line bullying, while 44% said that they had been Internet bullies.


 Socially, they really aren't sure how to behave and interact in the cyber-world," said Kids Help Phone spokesperson Donna Hansplant. "There are no generations before them that they could learn from, and kids learn from modeling."

 But where does the responsibility lie for ensuring that today's youth are mentored in the areas of appropriate behaviour, knowing right from wrong, and making good choices? With the community, or with that child's parents?
 
 "Because parents are spending less and less time with their kids, because both parents are working for economic reasons, and because the hold parents have on kids is less and less, it's a struggle to be the people who determine the identity of your child," said forensic psychologist Marta Weber, who has studied the effects of parental influence on children.

 "What happens in school and in the mall and on the street becomes more and more important. So the variables are more and the relative impact of parents is smaller."

 It certainly isn't easy to be a parent these days. But with the decision to procreate comes a lifelong commitment to the children one is bringing into this world. That commitment should not be taken lightly.

 While society has a supporting role to play in ensuring its youth grow up to be productive citizens, the ultimate responsibility for raising a child falls squarely on the shoulders of the parents.

 And it's a cop-out to suggest otherwise.

  Krista is a Sun columnist. She can be reached by e-mail at: kboryskavich@aim.com.

Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@wpgsun.com.