Role of Parents Diminishes from Generation to Generation - Essay Example

Children no more need their parents for guidance and supervision. All they need to do is click on Google to know whether a decision is right or wrong, to know the consequences of bad career choice, and to know if they need to correct their diet. Parents’ role has diminished. No doubt, this is a tragedy. Nothing can substitute the ultimate love and care that parents can give to their child. Internet does not pray for us. Media does not feed us. Movies do not pick us up when we fall down. But getting ahead of this emotional debate, let’s ponder upon why parents’ role has diminished, and what the aftermath is.

Helena Norberg-Hodge (632) writes that today, teenagers are ashamed of their traditional ways of living, and to be precise, they are ashamed of their parents. They do not admire their parents anymore; instead, they appreciate all those chic-clothed classy actors and actresses they see on television. Their parents have become old-fashioned for them. They do not like their parents asking them to choose a way of life that involves working in the fields and getting their hands dirty for little or no money, and certainly no glamour” (Norberg-Hodge 632, para.3). .

Apparently, we are connecting to the world through online social networks, like Facebook and Orkut, but what happens in real? We are disconnecting from real life. This disconnection diminishes the role of significant others in children’s lives, especially that of the parents. This has given rise to the big generation gap, accompanied with scary communication barriers. “We tried to make our conversation seem like more than an interview”, writes Rodriguez (201), telling about his experience when he talked to his mother on Christmas vacation.

Why, today, parents and children need to put in effort to bring some life to their conversation? Why does it not come up naturally, with care and concern? This is because children are emotionally distant from their parents. Parents, themselves, are too busy nowadays, and they provide their children with expensive electronic gadgets, multichannel cables, LCD televisions, and computers, which children spend most of their time with. They have ready-made food available to them at McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and KFC.

They do not need their mother’s good old recipe driven healthy food anymore. They absorb knowledge from what they see on media channels. They learn everything before parents even get the chance to tell them. Mothers wait for the right menstrual age of their daughters to tell them about it, and daughters already know it. Fathers wait for their boys to get big enough to be told about safe sex, and the boys already know it. It is all around them- the information, the knowledge, the statistics, the facts and figures, the good consequences and the bad ones.

Then, why would they need their parents anymore? Today’s age has made them