In these days, we have the stress of parents not having enough time for each other, because of the pressure of work, parents leave home early, seeking their daily bread and do not get home until late, perhaps when the children may have gone to bed. As a result, there is not adequate time for families to bond and be united in faith and life. To make matters worse, television and the internet have intruded into family life, such that they seem to be taking the little time that families could have had together. It is such that people are nearly always browsing the internet and chatting up on the social media, and so they do not have the time to engage themselves in discussion as families. As a result, children do not know one another and parents do not know what their children are up to. I hear of some families that have taken the extreme decision of chucking the TV out of their living rooms just so that they can begin to bond together as a family.
Is it not the case that some families do not pray together again because of TV and internet? Yet, we all know that the family that prays together stays together. In these days, we have situations in which some parents do not even try to conceal their moments of disagreement from the children. In our days, we have problems of infidelity in marriage with the attendant effects on family life. In our days, we even hear and read of the abomination of fathers who abuse their female children and their wards. Family life ought to lead us to holiness of life. It is a vocation by which God calls parents to be first teachers of the faith to their children, the teachers of prayer and Catholic way of living faith in Christ.
• Most Rev. Alfred Adewale Martins is the Archbishop of the Metropolitan See of Lagos.
