Wednesday, April 17, 2013

ChanLan Hong / Timed Essay / Tuesday / 9 a.m

Being a daughter brought up in a family of Confucius teachings, I have been constantly told that nothing is more important than my family. I grew up looking at this saying "If your members of the family are at peace, anything you do will lead you to success" daily, the moment I woke up and before going to bed. As of  today, take a morning coffee sip and look into the newspaper. Headlines such as "Son Bashed Father" or "Sexual Harassment" are some prevalent issues in our society. The reason why society is changing for the worst is due to the lack of traditional value teachings, influence of the media as well as dependency on electronic gadgets.

           One predominant cause to the society's downfall is the lack of traditional values teachings to the children. Traditional values such as honesty, forgiveness and being filial are values that a child learns from home. However, parents now are working all day and night in order to make ends meet and hardly ever spend time with their children. Due to the absence of these traditional values, children are unable to tell what is right and wrong and this is one of the factors that contributed to the crime rates.

          To many of us all, TV is an important asset and we spend most of the time watching the television. Little did we know about the contents of the program and children as young as 3 years old might be exposed to images where parents are sent to old folks home by children. Besides that, advertisement too plays a very important role. Most of the time, successful men are shown with a grand car, a beautiful woman and money, but nothing related to parents. These innocent children will grow up believing that, that is how a successful man should be and parents are very likely to be neglected by children in the future.

          Last but not least, the high dependency on electronic gadgets also bring a negative effect to the society. Electronic gadgets such as ipad/mp3, Smartphone, tablets etc are creating barriers between parents and children. A family might plan for a day to have dinner together, however, instead of communicating to one another, children are much more indulged into text messaging their friends or playing games on their gadgets. Not only does it cause a growing distance between family members but also, the intimacy between parents and children are also disappearing.

This harsh realism about how our society is changing for the worst is indeed saddening. The aforementioned causes has resulted in smaller household where parents are left to live by themselves during old age, also, broken relationships between parents and children. If we impose more of traditional values teachings at home, more of educational TV programs, and using electronic gadgets wisely, I believe this can bridge us closer to the gap between the ideal society and the contemporary society.  

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