As parents, do you ever get the feeling your family doesn’t really need you – they just use you? It can happen to many parents when their children reach the all-knowing, quite independent age of adolescence.
When they are young, kids can be coerced into helping with the dishes, they can be taught the value of maintaining a tidy room and will often be heard to actually offer help with the maintenance jobs around the home.
Some of today’s adolescents see it beneath their station in life to perform menial housekeeping tasks. Kissing parents in front of their peers is just too embarrassing. As for mowing grass and having a tidy room, that’s just all too much to expect.
It is my view that today’s society doesn’t seem to view the family structure with the same values we as parents should try to instil into our children. It might not be fashionable, but we still need to teach our kids principles such as manners and respect for themselves and others. This is something their tablets and iPads can’t do.
Hopefully, those values will be passed on to future generations, when our kids start to realise themselves what being a parent is all about.
I’m Peter Mack and that’s life.