Family.

Walking down the street I see people walking together.

A stooped elderly man next to his still straight smaller wife.

A teenager next to an older version of herself with their dog on a leash.

A young man and his wife wandering down the path enjoying the sunshine and spring air that’s descended this afternoon after days of gray.

In these strange times where we’ve been forced to group together in our own family groups I can’t help but muse on what family means.

Its always been said that families are the building blocks of a society. Without a stable family unit most people struggle. Contrary to that fact our modern society has tried its best to undermine the importance of family.

Its advocated that sending children off to be cared for by strangers at the earliest age possible is good for their development of independence when most studies show that its not the case. Instead children lack trust and emotional bonding with their primary carers (parents). We have an unprecedented amount of young adults who don’t leave home and find themselves directionless.

Divorce has spread like an unchecked disease destroying families like a warzone and yet its accepted as normal and things like being married, which gave more cement to families, have become an outdated practise. If these things were really beneficial for the human psyche then surely everyone who has gone through it would say so.

The truth is that family has a great impact on us.

Adults carry the issues they experienced growing up into adulthood.

Maybe if we look at children we could learn to get back to the true way society should work. All they want is time with their parents. The one thing our busy lives steal from them.

Add full time schooling when they are young, despite the fact that they could learn all of primary school in secondary school in half the time they had to struggle through it as young kids, isn’t a wonder we are loosing our family bonds.

Technology is great but has brought further distractions from interacting. Tv for tired parents in the evening instead of chatting with their kids. Games that addict kids from a young age.

It takes supernatural effort to focus, listen and engage.

Before long their eager little faces turn to their own screens and they don’t seek what they most need.

Family.

Maybe amidst this pandemic something good could come out of it. A reset of the priorities of society as a whole.

A return to values that added more quality to our lives than the ones our modern society embraces.

We’ve been forced to stop the rat race. To look each other in the eye.

I walk down the road watching as the people approaching me on the sidewalk step onto the road to give me a wide berth before I can offer to be the one to leave the sidewalk.

I smile at strangers and find that most are smiling back something that was a rarer occurrence before this year of forced seclusion. Maybe its not just bringing families closer but society as a whole.

When you loose something you often realise you need it.

Interaction with others. Good old fashioned friendliness. Maybe we just have the time to smile and say hello because we aren’t rushing to and fro.

They say as the human race we share 99.9 percent genetic make up. Essentially things like race has no great bearing on our basic building blocks. We are one big family.

And if we treated everyone as family what a better place this world could be.

If we spend time with our children, help them understand their emotions and how relationships work we would be adding value to the next generation that no amount of schoolwork could make up for.

Teach them to value family because without it our society is in trouble. Teach them to value people as a whole because we are all connected. Then we stand a chance.

The one thing that brought every great society to an end was the break down of the family unit.

This is our wake up call. Our chance to change our society for the better.