FAMILY, PARENTS AND CHILDREN (Part 1/2) by Matsyavatara dasa (Marco Ferrini)

We are living in a particular age of rapid social and cultural changes and it is our responsibility to ask ourself whether and how delicate and essential family relationships between parents and children can endure, without missing the meaning and purpose of a basic relationship, for the sake of every person and for a human and spiritual development.

Nowadays, there are parents and children whose family structure is poor of ethical and spiritual values. Therefore we risk to sink in a ‘no land man’ with uncertain boundaries, with feelings, roles and attitudes that need to be arranged and experimented by paying a high price for human, individual and collective damages.

The influence of a hedonistic-consumerist culture, has progressively diverted the attention of the majority of people from a spiritual oriented path to a pseudo-value alternative which has deeply transformed and distorted people and family concepts.

Technology has given a strong support to science in many fields, but it has not been able to develop a similar ethical model in order to solve all those problems that new technological developments have dramatically and urgently made us to face with. Some of the problems are: a low supply of energetic and nutritious ailments, uncertainty about the use of nuclear power, finance and economy, genetic contamination. Because of old and new tensions and because of the impoverishment of a religious spirit, a wide degenerated ethical behavior has spread all around.

All this has contributed to afflict the traditional relations within a family household, in particular between husband and wife, between parents and children. By taking into account modern changes, family rights have been revised. We can think, for example, of single mothers’ rights, most of whom are very young ladies. We can also think of the increased number of abortions, or of the million drug, smoking and alcoholism addiction victims. Another clear sign of sorrow is the kid’s sufferance because of divorced parents and others who suffer from family violence. In this crazy world, the first victims are children, who are always more affected by character disturbances.

By reading these facts carefully, we cannot avoid to notice the lack of ethical and spiritual values which has been the cause of its development, neither can we avoid to notice that the family has lost the motivation of its well-being: the purpose of transcendental living. Nowadays more than ever, religion has become a formality and we call God only to demand a social wellness which has become the sole purpose of life. With such low morality, parents and children, even husbands and wives, very often show egoistic interests which contrast the spirit of the family. Therefore most of them live together for convenience, sharing an empty relationship with no sacred meaning and without a superior love. When one of the two parents, in fact, does not gain anything in return, very soon one shows weariness, lack of spirit of sacrifice and without thinking and with no regret leaves the family.