Priorities of child care

07.JUNE.11

Excerpts from the lecture:

“HOME ECONOMICS SOLUTIONS FOR SUSTAINING FAMILY LIFE”

Dr. A Cecil Cyrus

Delivered at the opening of the Caribbean Association of Home Economists Inc Conference

MATERNAL CARE

The first priority of child care is the provision of adequate nutrition for the child’s normal physical growth and development.{{more}} But, equally so, and vital for its mental development, is maternal love. Many years ago, John Bowlby wrote a significant monograph for the World Health Organisation, called Maternal Care and Mental Health. I quote the following excerpts from it. “The quality of the parental care which a child receives in his earliest years is of vital importance for his future mental development. What is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother-substitute), in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment. A state of affairs in which the child does not have this relationship is termed “maternal deprivation”. A child is deprived even though living at home if his mother (or permanent mother-substitute) is unable to give him the loving care small children need. Again, a child is deprived if for any reason he is removed from his mother’s care. All children under the age of three years suffer through maternal deprivation; and even a large proportion of those between three and five also are victims of this. The mother-love which a young child needs is so easily provided within the family, and is so very difficult to provide outside it.”

The increasing incidence of teenage pregnancy is associated with maternal deprivation, because some of these immature child-parents are not yet equipped to provide the loving care essential for the emotional development of their offspring. Yet another problem is that young children are often left to manage their younger siblings or children of others, while the respective parents are absent from home for various reasons. And this often leads to family rifts and disruption.

Even though fathers are not living at home with their children, yet, it is essential for them to take an active interest and participate in their welfare, taking them to and from school, showing interest in their school and extra-curricular activities. Equally important is that they should honour their monetary obligations to ensure the children’s material welfare.

DISCIPLINE

The home should not be like the military where rules and regulations are ruthlessly inviolable. In any well ordained home, family rules must be a gradual growth, an evolution, over the years, by example, so that the impressionable child gradually learns what is the norm for the family.

Today, we live in a world that is too permissive, and there are so many human rights inflicted on the family that one wonders who is in authority, the parents or the child. In England, one little brat challenged his mother with the threat that he knew the police hotline to report her salutary scoldings.

There must be discipline in every family, or the end result of permissive, disorderly conduct will be chaos. It was Socrates who cautioned, “Are you not risking the greatest of your possessions? For children are your riches and upon their training for well or ill depends the whole order of their father’s home.”

FAMILY ACTIVITIES AND GATHERINGS

There is no better way of sustaining the family as a unit than participation in various activities together. These include having meals together, family conversations and discussions, playing games, going to church and other places. It is binding for parents or guardians to take a daily interest in their children’s school work and other activities by discussion with them.

Family gatherings are an important avenue through which personal and family problems may be aired and solutions sought, and old wounds healed in an amicable manner, in a spirit of true caring and concern.

It is vital that all members of the family acknowledge that they are of different characters and temperaments. And so, they must make allowances for differences of taste and preferences in many aspects of family life. Some may be quiet and not gregarious, while others are the opposite. Neither type should be ridiculed, but accepted for who he is. Of course, the reticent and reclusive must be made to join in the family chat or frolic on occasions, while the effervescent must be restrained at times, for the common good.

Today, this aspect of family life has become difficult because of various influences. Most prominent is the lure of the television, the IPod, the cell phone and several other electronic devices and games. But this challenge is not insurmountable, as parents in a well-regulated family can lay down reasonable rules governing the use of these gadgets.

(to be continued)