Revisiting the role of the elderly in better parenting

Sep 04, 2008 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Your editorial on Better Parenting (Kaieteur News, Sunday August 31) made excellent reading. My one comment is that it seemed to ignore the existence, if not the preponderance, of ‘non-traditional’ families, especially one-parent families as well as the role of the elderly.
Your “tips to remind parents, particularly fathers, that parenting does not end with sending the kids off to school or generally getting them out of the house”, recognise that school may be the central influence on a child’s upbringing. This is an accurate observation and holds good everywhere in the world.
However, in Guyana, we have an often forgotten asset in the parenting arena and process. I refer here to the influence of grandparents and elders in general.
As in any ‘modern’ society, we are asking children to raise children and to instill values that many young parents themselves do not have or fully appreciate.
Quite often in more developed, industrialised countries the grand parents or family elders are virtual strangers to children in terms of parenting. However, Guyana is well placed to expose its young to the well-honed parenting skills and time-proven wisdom of elders.
Apart from having a very small population, most communities tend to live in geographical proximity one to another. In contrast, in the USA, for instance, a young child in Des Moines, Iowa, or in New York may be separated from his or her grandparents in Melbourne, Orlando or Miami, in Florida by over 2,000 miles. His Guyanese counterpart, in many cases, may be separated by a mere two or 20 miles…even 200 miles seems unlikely.
Guyana should embrace this spatial advantage and encourage young people to live closely with the elders. We must not abandon the elderly to live by themselves and cope on their own. Our elders should not be ignored and left to work out their own final destinies. If better parenting is our goal the elderly must be fully integrated into the parenting process and held close, as part of a vibrant caring community built on love and respect.
If Better Parenting is the objective the elders are right there, deep within the bosom of the community and that family or those families as contributing members. And, their raising of their own or someone else’s progeny is as organically correct as it feels in our society to have the biological parents do this. Too often we abandon our elderly to a lonely, inactive existence in a home for the elderly when these persons have a wealth of experience, acquaintance with and respect for the values we attribute to the good society. We need to do much more to ensure these civilizing values are passed on to younger generations.
Though we live in difficult economic and material times, the cost of keeping the elderly cannot be compared with the type and quality of contribution our elders make. Their value in better parenting is truly incalculable.
Amazingly, in our present ‘new-age’ culture, we are asking offspring to learn the basics of life from persons who are still learning about the basics of life themselves.
We need to get the elders much more involved in organising and supervising the learning and parenting processes. In so doing we need not be overly family conscious and selective (in terms of genetic similarity) in our efforts to involve the elderly. Aunt Mary in a Home for the Elderly with no family to call her own may have as much to offer in parenting skills as Aunt Sophie who lives en famille with her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Once the elderly, any elderly, are involved, offspring stand a greater chance of being raised in a stable environment of wisdom, great patience, deep understanding and love.
The Government and the energetic Minister for the family seem to now acknowledge that given adequate resources, single parents are able to bring up children just as satisfactorily as couples can. They must now realise also that, like it or not, the non-traditional family, in all its forms, is here to stay. Government can help by seeing that the parenting role of the elderly is carried out in an organised, widespread and continuous way. Also, these elderly ‘life-givers’ can be compensated for this service to the community and to the restoration of the ‘good society’. I am confident that, with consultation and heart, our energetic young Minister for the family can come up with a formula that works.

The task is therefore to revisit the role of the elderly in better parenting, stabilising society and to encourage the redefinition of the parenting adult to include trusted elderly whether uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbours and other respected elderly persons who may be genetically unrelated.
F. Hamley Case

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