The World is Fast Becoming an Old Age Home

Old Man
Wikimedia Commons by Leroy Allen Skalstad

In our childhood, we treat the people whom we love as Gods. This thing applies more on our parents. But when we grow up, we feel and find that they too are tragically human. This realisation may sometimes complicate the things, when the label of hypocrisy gets affixed on the parents and a latent ego clash begins. 

Despite mutual love and affection, the hostility gets developed between the parents and the children, which gets embedded into the subconscious. It may be due to ego, generation gap, individualism, materialism, nuclear family concept or other issues. This further strains the relations and leads to breaking of family ties.

It is a matter of great concern that the parents who sacrificed their lives for the children are abandoned by the same, and are forced to live in old age homes in their declining age and sinking frame. 

Another reason for this problem is the selfishness of the children, which is due to the faulty upbringing by the parents. In their efforts to make the children successful in the society, which is presently highly competitive, the parents fail to cultivate a sense of mercy, honesty, compassion, and humanity in them. 

The parents themselves teach the children not to get involved in anything except their personal advancement. They teach the child not to bother about the lonesome puppy left astray on the road, even if the child is afraid that it may get overrun by some vehicle. The result is an indifferent and self- centered new generation. 

Behaving exactly as per the teachings of their elders the grown up children leave the parents like that puppy, which they saw in their childhood. The sermons always get affixed in the psyche of the child and his aforesaid behaviour becomes an innate quality. His compassion becomes shallow without his knowing, and the whole society adopts this attitude. But when the old age comes the same parents expect exactly the opposite from their children.

Further our education system too has lost its moral appeal. The stories of greedy dog, union is strength faithful dog etc., are no more in the curriculum. The man and his material needs are the primary concerns. 

Now there is a new concept of live-in relationship, that is, there is no family, and who knows what form the society will take when the children born of these relations, would become adults. We are slowly moving towards animal life without any “Oedipus” complex.

Further Reading- How to Make Old Age Ideal