Homemade failures

In May 2007, Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 on the campus of Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Virginia. He also turned the gun on himself after killing the others. It was shocking for everyone around. Details about Cho unraveled after he committed his gory crime tell us that he was a nearly insane character who seemed to have had difficult childhood. We also had great people. We are happy about them and try to imitate them. All these greatness or belittling elements in us take us back partially to our childhood and to our families. It is for this reason that everyone values the childhood and the formation given to children in the family.
All of us bring back our childhood memories now and then. We cherish many moments of ecstasy and thrill. We have accumulated within us the years of experiences as memories. We were nourished by our experiences which shaped us. Others see in us what the past had written on us. Others experience the good or bad things that have made us up. Many have appreciated or cursed us for the kind of persons we are.
We see we have two important factors moulding us. One is the genes passed on to us; the other is the environment which shapes us. We find ourselves unable to modify what has been in us by our genes. We are able to change the environment in which we live. The family in which we are brought up is the environment which we can alter or change to suit us.
The Home is the nursery of character. Just as the home is the most potent influence for good training, so it is for bad. We do not mean that it is the only influence, for the school, companions and other circumstances to which the child is exposed, all play their part in moulding his character and shaping his personality. But the faulty or the good mental habits that are most deeply furrowed in the mind are those which are planted during the plastic years of early childhood. The fist seven years of life constitute perhaps the most important period for training to wholesome mental attitudes. The difficulties of most "problem children" originate in the family. A very large percentage of failures in life are homemade failures.
This is a broad statement but it is not so dogmatic as it may at first appear. For it is in the home that the child lays down the emotional attitudes that form the basis of his adult personality. Since the environment of the home is chiefly the creation of the parents, it is the responsibility of parents to supply a home atmosphere that will foster the growth of healthy attitudes in their children.
The child’s first teacher, and in some respects the most important teacher he will ever have, is the parent. Others may impart more knowledge and information to the child but it is from his parents that he receives his basic points of view, his methods of tackling his problems, and is fundamental philosophy of life. In the early years the parents interpret life for the child and at the same time they lay the foundations on which he will build his own future interpretations. The parents decide what pictures hang on the wall, the books that come into the home, the kind of people who visit there, the type of conversation that is encouraged, the neighbourhood in which the child is reared, the school and church he attends, and the countless other things that enter into his experience. All these factors influence the child’s present emotional responses. Many of them arouse permanent dispositions that will colour his reactions to the problems he encounters in later life.
Almost a quarter of a billion children are working as child labourers today, and will continue toiling tomorrow despite the world’s promise to care for every child, the scourge of child labour still leaves countless children deprived of their most basic rights. The saddest thing is that it happens now right where they are supposed to be secure. These children have become homemade failures.
We need a renewed determination to protect the lives of all children. Governments must be called upon to meet the commitments in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and in the ILO Conventions on child labour. The international community must make the protection and development of children the first priority in aid programmes. Businesses must stop using children to turn a quick profit. And above all, ordinary people, adults and children alike, must make it clear that the abuse of children as child labourers has no place in this world.
The commercial exploitation of children in both developing and developed countries has come to be recognised as the most common form of child abuse today. Subjected to physical, psychological and emotional abuse, children are often trapped with no other options, but to be bonded in the families. Too often society simply accepts their labour at homes as a harsh reality and turns a blind eye as the children suffer horrendous abuse.
Do we consider ourselves civilised? Do we deserve to be called humanity when we take the youngest children and abuse them for petty profit and power?