IF Sen. Robin Padilla was correct when he said today’s young generation is weak, what does it say about the parents who raised them?
My own experience tells me that today’s parents are weak, maybe weaker than their children, who, approximating Padilla’s timeline, may now include grandchildren. About two decades ago, my wife and I found out that our high-school son, Roy — his real name — was skipping classes. He spent whole school days mostly playing billiards with his friends. With the daily allowance we managed to provide, he also got hooked on money games. At that time, I was working for a national government project in Tacloban City. We rented a house for accommodation. The tasks entailed field work that kept me away at times, sometimes for as long as a week.
Most of Roy’s friends were neighbors.
The father of one of his friends was working overseas, but, to the dismay of his family back home, could not remit money regularly. The chatter buzz among nosy neighbors was that there was another family he was obliged to support. This forced his wife, the mother, to take on various jobs — often as a “yaya” and house help — which meant she looked after somebody else’s children more than she could do for her own brood.
The parents of another friend worked in Manila, which was like having a father or mother working overseas. He lived with the family of a paternal uncle.
Another friend was luckier to have both of his parents working as government employees, which meant they had more time to look after their kids than the absentee parents did.
When we found out our son was skipping classes, there had been signs of misfeasance, but we largely ignored them. Even during evenings or weekends, he was mostly out with his friends. We did not feel alarmed, knowing that playing basketball, sometimes in community-level tournaments, was one of his favorite diversions. His mother, however, nagged him about his being too “barkadista.” This turned into a routine spat between them when he started failing to show up until the wee hours of the morning. Up to this point, I did not have the heart to confront him beyond what could pass as a gentle reprimand.
One early morning, a van stopped in front of our residence. I saw his friends inside the vehicle just as its door opened from which a uniformed man alighted. He was looking for our son who, at that time, was still asleep. We roused him up. The cop told us he and his friends were being brought to the police station for questioning. I noted he did not mention anything about my son being arrested, so off they went without a fuss. Even if there was an arrest, I was too dumbfounded to think about the proper procedure it required: that the cop needed to show me an arrest warrant before he could whisk away my son.
Strangely, I felt some kind of relief at seeing Roy being subjected to the eye of state authority. Because I failed to discipline him, I felt indebted to the government for doing a parenting task that, from day one, I should have diligently performed.
At the police station, we parents learned that our children had stolen a few items of home appliance sets, as alleged by yet another neighbor. The kids admitted to having committed the offense, but a few hours later, were sent home for being minors.
As parents, my wife and I were subjected to a battery of questions. There was also a warning of dire consequences should Roy be found getting into another conflict with the law.
We decided to send him to live with his paternal uncle in our hometown in Eastern Samar. He switched schools to continue his secondary studies. He eventually finished high school in seven years, counting his two years of schooling in Tacloban City.
What happened was that while we tried to be a good parent to our son, we failed to impose discipline at a time when emotional, physical and mental development surges all at the same time. We did not own our parenting issues. Instead, we tried to pass them first to the men in uniform, then to the uncles and aunts.
Roy would go on to earn a college degree and have his own family. They — he and his wife, two kids, a sibling, our youngest — now live in Manila. Both young parents are wage earners, barely getting by with very modest means.
Homing instinct brought my wife and me to our place of birth, the same town where Roy found his liberation from the “barkada.” Yet, casual banter with neighbors as recent as yesterday tells me how today’s young have fallen slaves to all sorts of addiction. Drugs, online games, alcohol, gambling, etc., command more time than farming or any other productive labor to while away the time.
Every other person here recalls how “busy” the población streets were with sachets of meth, or shabu, being peddled openly in public. The communities rediscovered some sense of order when Rodrigo Duterte came to power.
The killings brought about by the war on drugs happened everywhere except in less urbanized areas like our hometown. But the young here got the message and dropped their addiction. Most parents here must feel indebted to a government that did the chore for them, never mind those who got killed and whose sacrifice spoke for conversion.
I am not a fan, but the diehards outnumber me. In my hometown, the ratio is 1 to 10, maybe more, in favor of Duterte. The Dutertes will thrive not because they champion a rules-based order, but because today’s parents are weak.
haberia@gmail.com