Our Desk | An urgent call for new parents

Renato Marques

At a first glance, it might seem that I am making an appeal for procreation in Macau. No, that is not the case at the moment, although the government keeps saying that the population is ageing and we know that they are already planning to allow fathers to be absent from their workplace for three to five days after the birth of a child…

My point here is not about the fathers (and mothers) to be but, instead, the ones that are already out there. And no, this is not one of those “unique” things of Macau either; it is a very broad and worldwide situation.

Let’s face it, the current generation of parents is “pretty bad” and I am perfectly fine to comment about it as I am talking about myself too – although I like to think that I am still (partially) an exception to this group, or may be I am just trying to remind myself of the stones that I do not want to trip on my path.

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to experience a sequence of events that led me to think that parents nowadays are really bad. Not in the sense that they are rude or harsh in the way they treat their kids, but quite the contrary.

On Saturday I was having lunch outdoors near the seaside in probably the only place where this is possible in the Macau SAR when I saw a mother shouting to her son who was playing in the sand near the restaurant.

According to the father, the kid “needed a break.”

Yes, you read that right. The kid, about 10 years old, “needed a break” from playing in the sand because in part that his t-shirt and shorts were wet – an unexpected nightmare that left his parents (really) upset with him and led to the “break time.”

During this so-called break, they just stared at each other next to the table and did nothing. If that is not a harsh punishment, I do not know what is a harsh punishment.

Luckily the punishment was concluded with that and the kid was not forced to sit in a chair or play with a tablet or a mobile phone. Lucky him. I saw several others that were so ‘removed’ that they were almost seated at a different table from their parents. They did not have the same luck.

On another occasion and while taking my own daughter to play in the park, I heard shouts of panic from another group of parents because the kids were… sliding… on the slide. Yes, the playground slide. Not head-first, not anything wild and crazy, just plain sliding and that was “dangerous.”

I started to think, am I the crazy one to let my daughter do cartwheels and jump on the trampoline and climb rocks and play football and ride a bicycle?

I realized that today’s parents would have had a shock-induced heart attack had they been witness to my average weekend, when I was 10 years old.

Okay, I do carry a few “medals” from those days. The same goes for many of my friends, but still, we are alive and well, nobody died and very few made the hospital their home for more than a few hours. Most of all, we recall those times as the best of our lives.

Please, parents, I beg you, let your kids play! They will thank you for that later!