Ian BoyneIT IS refreshing to see that the Prime Minister has elevated the issue of family life to the centre of the national agenda, and that she has taken on what amounts to a national crusade for responsible parenting, particularly fatherhood.
One expects that, in due course, she will back up her activism with the relevant
legislative action but, in the meantime, civil society should support her enthusiastically for taking on this critical issue. In her swearing-in speech, she addressed the issue of family life and she did so again in her Budget presentation recently. She was back on the issue again last Tuesday when she devoted an entire presentation to the subject.
Addressing the 'Family is Love' exhibition put on by the Child Development Agency, the Prime Minister, according to one press report, made the significant point that, "We need to understand that with all the talk about the need to increase foreign investments and production, lower interest rates, reduce the debt and maintain a competitive exchange rate, if we don't pay attention to the quality of our family life and structure, any gains made in the macroeconomy will be wiped out."
This is a profoundly important point. That it could be made by a Prime Minister is even more
significant.
NOTORIOUSLY ECONOMISTIC
Political leaders are notoriously economistic. Many don't see the big picture. But, as Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller told the gathering on Tuesday, "Strong nations are built by strong families."
The most regrettable thing about Opposition Leader Bruce Golding's excellent Budget presentation recently is that he completely ignored the pivotal issue of values and social capital, including family.
Fortunately, however, this crucial issue was not ignored by his spokesman on education, the very engaging, creative and promising young politician, Andrew Holness. The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) usually treats social issues as a subset of larger economic or political issues. Their spokespersons usually take an economistic approach to social and moral issues when they are not politicising them.
So if you mention the fact that more young girls are contracting HIV/AIDS, or that teenage pregnancy is increasing, or that rape is on the rise, the answer usually is that this is because the economy is not growing; because we have had so many years of negative growth under the People's National Party, and because there is not sufficient investment in the economy. Every problem is either an economic or political one for the JLP.
MARXIAN APPROACH
Ironically, they take the Marxian approach that all the problems of the 'superstructure' are explained by the economic 'base'. In other words, they are largely economic determinists. Well, Andrew Holness broke with that tradition in the JLP in his fine Budget presentation, delivering a treatise on family life that is the finest ever to be uttered by any JLP politician I have heard (and I have been following politics keenly since the 1970s).
Rather than chanting the old JLP mantra that all our social crises are economic at base (or political), young Holness said boldly in the Parliament: "Mr. Speaker, when 80 per cent of births are to single mothers, there is something going wrong with the institution of the family. When 75 per cent of our children live with only one parent or no parents at all, then we must be concerned with what is happening to our families. When the father is absent from the lives of at least 70 per cent of all children in Jamaica, then we must be prepared to do something about it."
He did not go on to link this to 'PNP mismanagement of the economy' or the 'failure to grow the economy in 17 years' (I can hear Audley Shaw intoning). He dealt with that issue on its own, accepting philosophically that the superstructure can have an independent existence, though it would necessarily be affected by the economic base. (In that sense, he was more Parsonian than Marxian).
The kind of link Holness made between economics and the
family was the very sensible and empirically robust position that strong families produce better economic outcomes and are associated with national wealth. The family, he pointed out, plays an important role in capital accumulation and, therefore, Jamaica's poor and dysfunctional family structure is a contributor to our structural poverty.
AILING INSTITUTION
Holness was absolutely clear: "Mr. Speaker, it is time that we do something about the ailing institution of the family. It is time we get back the fathers in the family. It is time we take a second look at teen pregnancy." He knows the myopia of some of his colleagues in Parliament (on both sides of the House) and he felt moved to note that "there are some persons here who may feel that the state should not get involved in family structures or promoting the family."
But the young and intellectually capable MP, who is fast becoming one of the most respected politicians in the country, went on to remind that the family is "an important mechanism of social control," and "when the family fails, the value system fails and it becomes difficult to achieve social cohesion and order."
The more we have politicians talking like this and bringing issues of the family and values to the centre of the national agenda, the further we will be on the road to economic development and social stability. Economic growth and constitutional reform are vitally important. But they have to be undergirded by a system of enriching and enabling values and attitudes.
GET WITH THE PROGRAMME
Andrew Holness recommended to the Prime Minister that she establish a special committee of representatives of the Church, academic, non-governmental organisations, family advocate groups, Members of Parliament and relevant Government ministries to consider the best family structure for Jamaica, and ways to influence the society toward that ideal, to "start the process of rescuing our families."
Holness has the most receptive Prime Minister he could have to adopt such a recommendation.
I see Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller working with Holness and, with their combined passion on the issue, leading their party colleagues to get with the programme. The Prime Minister has already said that the issue of family life will be one of her priorities.
In her address to the 'Family is Love' exhibition on Tuesday, she linked Jamaica's major concern of crime and violence with increasing fatherlessness and family breakdown, saying that crime fighting was not about narrow security concerns. She associated the brutality and callousness of some of our murders with the harshness and lack of love which characterised the murderers' early life.
The Prime Minister told the gathering, "The importance of family life cannot be over-emphasised. Indeed, I feel very passionately that we are not giving this issue the attention we ought to in Jamaica. We have to do something about our family life if we are going to fix the crime problem in Jamaica."
Anyone who doubts the centrality of this issue of family life in national development should get a copy of the Grace Kennedy Foundation lecture by executive director of the Early Childhood Commission, Dr Maureen Samms-Vaughan, titled 'Children caught in the crossfire'.
Samms-Vaughan, a highly accomplished academic, finds in her research that children from father-absent homes "manifest a number of internalising and externalising problem behaviours, including sadness and depression, aggression, sex role difficulties, early initiation of sexual activity and teen pregnancy, as well as poor social and adaptive functioning and low self-esteem."
She also revealed that they have poorer performance on academic and cognitive tests, exhibit disciplinary problems at school, evidence higher school absenteeism and dropout rates and lower occupational attainment. Said Samms-Vaughan in that Grace Kennedy Foundation lecture, now published in a booklet, "Jamaican children who live in the less stable common-law and visiting unions and those in single-parent homes or with a biological and surrogate parent have more delinquent behaviours and are more aggressive to others."
Inner-city MPs like the Prime Minister and Andrew Holness experience at a deep and profound level the consequences of poor family life patterns every day they walk in their constituencies. They don't have to read academic studies to know that our family life patterns in this country are literally killing us!
Holness called for a major public campaign similar to the 'Two is better than too many' campaign to promote a healthy family life. I suggest, however, that the issue of family life cannot be tackled by itself or outside the context of revamped values and attitudes. A half-hearted, puny and poorly-funded values and attitude campaign cannot help us. Millions of dollars would have to be mobilised for an effective campaign.
But, with no less a person than the Prime Minister expounding as passionately and as resolutely as she has been on the issue of family life and values in general, the country might just get what it has been waiting for, for a number of years. It should not be hard to get Bruce Golding on board. After all, young Holness is at his side to show him how his agenda could be advanced by a cultural, not just a constitutional, revolution.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. Email him at ianboyne1@yahoo.com
