Families are the fundamental building blocks of the society. They provide a shelter, comfort, peace, growth, provision, money, safety, warmth, fellowship, and aids personal growth, emotional development, financial independence. A home is a place you are able to err within the constraint of love, a place where bonds are thicker than the bondage of the law.
A child, teen and adult should be able to find these comfort in the home. Families do not only exist to merely provide for external necessities, but to be a cornerstone on which individuals can lean upon for emotional needs and acceptance. After all, if your family cannot accept how you were made, how then can any other? It is THIS very family that PRODUCED you the way you are.
A dysfunctional family is one that lacks in any of the above said criterion or more. Many Asian Chinese-thinking families are sorely lacking in the emotional aspect. Communication between parents and children have been reduced to a working minimal, one that stops at providing the externals without going deeper. A sense of pride, which stems from a fear of being vulnerable, stands in the way of expressing the deeper emotions. This accursed culture has stopped many good parents from seasoning their speech with salt. Parents aren't always to be blamed, but who sets the example in the family but the father and mother? It is assumed that with greater wisdom comes greater responsibility.
Many of the young, especially those who grew up in the 1990s, will be able to identify this fatal flaw and agree wholeheartedly with this analysis of the sad emotional state in which many adolescence and young adults find themselves in. Desiring close relationship with family but not getting it, they are forced to look somewhere else for this intimacy and therefore look for these satisfaction in their friends and peers. Sadly, many have gone astray in the midst of this pursuit and it is regrettable that more action is not taken to address the root of the problem.
The author strongly believes that all parents are good to their children. But do not just stop there. Expressing the outward does not shallow the inward love, but rather strengthens it. It means that parents are willing to abase themselves and look to their young and try to understand them at their level. This necessarily means the lack of outright immediate condemnation, which in itself requires much patience and longsuffering. This also means providing a safety net in which the young are allowed to express themselves and, with interest, parents spur their young to pursue their dreams.
All these ideals may not be achieved in the previous generation, but the author believes that the realization of these immensely distressing problems is the first step in rectifying and modifying this culture. The (only) hope is that the next generation (when the young grow up and form their own families) will not repeat the same mistakes and harden their heart further.
