Instant food, instant status updates, instant communication, instant information, instant whatnot…in the age of the instant everything, one thing has remained constant – there can be no instant family. Raising a family has required and will continue to require enormous patience, endurance, time, effort, care and concern.
There are no short cuts to building a family. It involves not just a personal relationship and a birth or two. It involves creating a web of relationships and more importantly maintaining it. It involves supporting the family economically to make it independent and strong.
It involves anchoring it to a value system for sustainability. It requires imbuing the family with the qualities of honesty, compassion, sensitivity, respect, love and the thousand and one other values without which the human race would not have survived so long.
It calls for establishing a cultural climate at home to give members the comfort of an individual and a collective identity. It means constantly educating and orienting members of the family to ensure that they grow intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. It requires ensuring justice and fairness in all transactions between members of the family, and between family and the community outside. It is empowering every member of the family to support, nurture and care for the family, to feel responsible for the family and accountable to it.
Above all, it involves empowering yourself with new skills and strengths that can help you meet all the requirements and challenges that come with being a family person. For who among us know the full import and significance and implication when we set out to start a family?
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