Families becoming strangers

This is an interisting article from Australia, and it hits kind of close to home for a lot of hard working Americans. Times are tough all around. Parents aren't around enough to bond and influence their kids like they should be, with working 6 and 7 days a week, the young are left to fend for themselves. I wonder if this has anything to do with all of the trouble our youth seem to be getting into these days. Hummm.

Anna Patty Education Editor

PARENTS can go almost a year without seeing their children at boarding school, relying on the internet and phone calls to stay in touch, says the principal of a leading Sydney girls school.

William McKeith, who heads PLC School in Croydon, says lack of quality time spent with children - largely the fault of parents' long working hours - is corroding family values.

Writing in the opinion pages of today's Herald, Dr McKeith says some high school students from overseas could go years without seeing their families.

"We are tired, stressed, irritable much of the time," he writes. "Some parents will seek out ways of avoiding contact with their children in order to minimise their exposure to these feelings … Some parents think the contact with their sons and daughters, gained through the telephone, the internet and Skype, is sufficient. A little bit like video conferencing between offices. It isn't."

The problem was not PLC's alone but shared among schools throughout Sydney and around the world, he said. "To earn enough money to make it, we haven't stopped to think what we are losing to do that," he writes. "If we are losing family values and community welfare, something needs to be done about that."

Dr McKeith calls for a community and government rethink on regulating employment and trading hours.

"Are we prepared to allow increasingly deregulated employment and hours of opening to determine how our families function and what happens to our children? Is it essential for hotels and other retail and business outlets to open seven days a week? Could there be a NSW referendum to determine public opinion on opening hours? Would there be support for a closure of shops on Saturday afternoons or Sunday mornings or afternoons?"

Elene Saville, of Strathfield, said she and her husband, Rod, who works for an IT company in North Sydney, juggled long working hours with raising two children, Isabella, 4, and Elyssa, 8.

Mrs Saville, who works for a major bank, said she was torn between her job and wanting to pick up her children each day from school. She manages to work from home one day a week so she can pick up the girls from Meriden School in Strathfield.

"It is very important that we spend time together and have meals together. It is important for us to catch up with family on the weekends."

Four days a week, she works in the city from 9am until 6pm, then picks up the children from after-school activities or their grandparents' house before heading home to feed them and help with their homework.

From about 8.30pm until 11pm, she is on the home computer to finish her day's work. "I am working hard because I am trying to put my kids through a good school and to pay off a large mortgage."

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