Clinton Chisholm |Empowering families as agents of change – Part 1

As I said years ago in a church in Barbados, whoever dares to start a family in these times deserves a medal for bravery or a madcap for folly. Whoever succeeds at raising a stable, wholesome family bears testimony to the existence of luck or the continuance of miracles.

I begin this way because the times in which we live are very tough and the threats to family life as we have known it at its best are very many. Indeed in some sections of the world, predictions are already out concerning the imminent or eventual demise of the traditional family.

Let me quickly protect myself against the sociologists by saying upfront that I am aware that ‘family’ attracts varying and varied definitions, but I share with you what I mean by the traditional family. At the base of my understanding of a traditional family is a plurality of people beginning with a male and a female with all family members sharing some bloodline and/or time-honoured legally sanctioned ties.

I emphasise the root reality of a male-female relationship as a core element of my understanding of family because that root reality finds support in the Maker’s instruction in the Bible and has been the most pervasive time-honoured root reality of family in all cultures studied with the emerging exception of our modern mixed-up/messed-up world.

If then we come to consider ‘empowering families’ we need to be aware of the forces that militate against the stability of families, for only stable families and stable family members will possess and can wield the power necessary for wholesome societal change.

There is something of a paradox here though in that only stable families and family members can command the necessary empowerment for wholesome societal change, yet the family itself is being destabilised by negative societal forces and negative societal changes.

We now identify one of the present threats to family life and observe that these threats point to the nature of the societal reformation/revolution that is so badly needed. I would also like to suggest that these threats to family life also hint at the calibre of empowerment that families need if they are to be agents of societal change.

Threats to Family Life

1. Parental Inadequacy

By this we mean the increasingly popular phenomenon of parents being unable to provide quality parenting because of ignorance about good parenting or because of insufficient time to provide good parenting despite the knowledge possessed.

There is a double edge to the issue of ignorance about good parenting: many current parents lacked exposure to good parenting skills while they were growing up and so did not learn much from personal experience or exposure and additionally, most of the younger parents (especially single mothers) are, by virtue of age, attitude, and awareness, definitely unready and unfit to be parents.

The tyranny of ‘bread-and-butter’ issues has robbed many parents of the time needed for family interaction and this usually has negative effects on all family members, but especially on children. The observation of Professor Emerita Elsa Leo-Rhynie of The UWI, Mona, is appropriate here:

“Family structure influences the opinions children form, the attitudes and values they develop, and the types of behaviour they display. Societal, subcultural, group and individual behaviours have been traced to the development of attitudes and values resulting from childhood experiences.” The Jamaican Family: Continuity and Change, Grace Kennedy Foundation Lecture 1993, p. 11.

Because of the economic realities of most Caribbean countries, ‘trying to survive on less so that one partner may remain at home for the children’ is no longer a live option for many partners, regrettably. I say, regrettably, because, despite the legitimate reasons why no parent can remain at home during the formative years of the child, we need to consider the long-term price we pay in terms of child development.

CRUCIALITY OF THEIR INFLUENCE

A further complication of the problem being discussed here is the reality that some parents, for different reasons , are not so much unable but unwilling to invest appropriate time in child-care.

The result is that children are left on their own or with ‘somebody else’ or ‘anybody else’. Friends, you don’t need even a class in sociology to know that children cannot be raised properly by accident or default, and they do not usually do as well as self-rising flour in raising themselves either.

Seemingly, parents are not only forgetful of the cruciality of their influence on their children as significant persons, but unmindful also of the dangers to which they expose their children when they are left with ignorant and irresponsible others.

Proverbs 22.6 is a call to parenting that sets boundaries for children, “train up a child in the way he should go” suggests deliberate purpose-driven parental effort in child-rearing.

We need more of the Hannah mentality in parenting today (see 1 Samuel 1. 21-28). Watch this dear lady’s deliberate decision in v. 22, against even ‘church attendance’ in the early years of her son’s life in order that she might see to his early postnatal needs, that’s what I mean by deliberate purpose-driven parental effort.

I share an equation from Proverbs. 22.6 which I developed years ago.

Expectations [‘should go’] + Efforts [‘train up’]= Effect [‘will not depart’].

This equation based on Proverb 22.6 is a recipe against our first threat to family life, parental inadequacy!

Rev Clinton Chisholm is a retired Jamaica Baptist Union pastor, holds an MA in biblical languages from Sheffield University in England and was a teaching assistant in Hebrew in the university’s Biblical Studies Department. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and rev@clintonchisholm.com