Parenting parents

The arrests over the weekend and last week of women involved in prostituting children to cyber-pornography in Lapu-Lapu City and Cordova town underscores anew the need for the State, the Church and everyone involved to help train current and future parents especially among the poor.

Cebu woke up to news of the Lapu-Lapu City arrest of a mother and an aunt who allegedly made a girl pose in front of a Web camera for the titillation of an American client, ironically on the feast of the birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Why do children continue to be exploited by their own parents among the pueblo amante de Maria or the people in love with Mary, model of perfect motherhood?

With the Internet becoming more and more a integral part of daily life, it would be naive to project a decline in the number of cases of parents commodifying their own flesh and blood, unless parents and future mothers and fathers in depressed communities are taught the value of and how to take care of their children.

Can Cordova and Lapu-Lapu City take the lead in passing an ordinance mandating mothers and fathers to go through parenting education?

They can coordinate for the implementation of such a program with local universities and colleges especially the ones that employ experts in the behavioral sciences.

Even the best practices of associations of teachers and parents can be instilled to empower poor parents to care better for their children.

Sadly, one of the failures of the Philippine formal educational system is that it equips graduates with skills and prepares them to be efficient units of labor, but teaches them very little with regard to the important vocation of parenthood.

This being the case, it comes as no surprise, in a manner of speaking, that parents who belong to the lower socioeconomic classes, with even less of a chance at any formal learning, literally hire their children out for bread.

We recognize that the Church has begun the task of spiritually forming parents to resist the temptation to feed their kids to voyeurs.

We recognize at the same time the darkness of the despair that drives the parents against the wall and forces them to sell their children in the name of livelihood.

The darkness cannot be dispelled by spiritual learning bereft of down-to-earth possibilities for salvation from material poverty.

In Christian theology the Word became flesh.

The spiritual rehabilitation of communities in too deep in cyber-pornography must bear fruit both in avenues for economic progress and the opportunity to learn quality parenting to make it a lifestyle.