Gender and Family:The crucial role of parents in shaping our future.

 ”I wished I had lots of money to give to my mom so that she wouldn’t have to work; so that she can spend more time with me.”  (girl with a single mom, from the video ‘Juggling With Work’)

I was struck by the simple, yet heart-wrenching words of this child in the video that we watched. This is real life proof of how the current trend of working women is affecting families worldwide. And I believe that this is the heart cry of many children who have ‘lost’ their parents to the workplace.

You could argue perhaps, that this is a different case- that she has a single parent, and things could have been different if she had both sets of parents. But I beg to differ. It doesn’t matter if a child has one, two, or even three parents (if that was possible). As long as parents are absent from their families because of work, they have lost their children.

When both parents work full-time, the responsibility of child-raising is shifted to someone or something else. This someone could be their grandparents, domestic workers or even childcare centres. However, I’m appalled that nowadays, parents have the audacity to leave their children in the ‘care’ of computers and television. Isn’t it common knowledge that family shapes the worldview of every child?

Coming from a single-parent background myself, I consider myself to be very blessed to be where I am today. My father passed away when I was 6, leaving my mother to feed 3 children, aged 6, 8 and 10. So she started to work, and left us in the care of a babysitter during the day. However, after a few years in the workforce, she decided to quit working and became a full-time mom.

Every night, she cooked dinner, and even when she didn’t, we went out and ate as a family. That was how she shaped my worldview on family-that is, a family sits together for meals. Mealtimes are the only time where we can meet and communicate with each other. Until now, this is what family means to me, and I find it rather strange when I come to know of families who do not have meals together although everyone is in the house.

To me, parents shoulder the responsibility of teaching and training their children. And this only happens when enough time is spent with their children. Sometimes parents equate the provision of finances with showing love to their children, but in fact, love equals time. Children need time with their parents. And when I say time, I mean quality time -the giving of undivided attention to their children, which excludes time spent sitting next to each other while the parent is making, and answering business calls.

Of course, work is important, but I feel there is a need for a clear dichotomy between work and family. Work should not be locking women in and shutting men out. To me, women bear the responsibility of nurturing their children. If they work, it should be only part-time, or on a temporary basis. Current financial difficulty is nothing compared to future emotional and spiritual security. And that only comes with quality time spent with children from young. I live to testify this truth. Honestly, my financial difficulties in the past only brought me more security now, because my security is not based on my material gains, but on who I am really inside.

In conclusion, let us focus on building up families, rather than on storing up capital gain and watching families breaking down. If Singapore really values its’ people, and considers them as resources of the country, then families should come first before work. Would you want to see Singapore poor in the future? Then just allow the current marriage and divorce rates to increase exponentially. Workers are only human, and they certainly will work joyfully even without emotional security.  

Work and Trade:Using old time theories in the modern world

We have been taking work for granted these days. I feel that here in this part of Asia, we have grown up with a blueprint of how life should be- 3 years in kindergarten, 10 years of primary and secondary schooling, 4 years in university, and then WORK. The only variation allowed is perhaps in the number of years and in which field.

Sometimes (if we don’t take sociology courses, or if we just don’t like deep thinking), we don’t think about the social significance of work. For now, let’s take a good look at work and what is it actually about.

‘Work’ is defined as the supply of physical, mental, and emotional effort to produce goods and services for own consumption, or for consumption by others.*A Dictionary of Sociology*. And ‘occupation’ is work done in exchange for a regular wage, or salary.

However, to me, work isn’t just about supplying our labour for money. I mean, that definition would only apply for animals. Humans have feelings and emotions. They have their needs and their wants, and I particularly agree with Abraham Maslow’s 5-level hierarchy of needs.

According to Maslow, our human needs have to be fulfilled from the bottom-up. This hierarchy comprises of: (1) physiological, (2) safety, (3) social, (4) esteem, (5) self-actualization. The lower-order ‘deficiency needs’ (1 to 3) have to be met before the higher-order ‘growth’ needs (4 and 5) can be satisfied. *A Dictionary of Human Resource Management*

Thus, when a person starts working, his main agenda is to meet his physiological needs- i.e., to provide for his food, shelter, and basic needs. And after this need is met, he goes on to the next ‘level’. Now, looking at work through the lenses of the developed and under-developed countries, I would say that most workers in developed nations would be on level 4, waiting to elevate themselves to level 5, while in under-developed nations, they are struggling just to meet their level-1 need. Of course, in both nations, there will be a small fraction on lower or higher levels than the rest of their community. And I suggest that, this is the cause of social problems- workers not having their needs met, no matter where they come from.

We can compare these levels within a country, or even across countries, but personally, I feel that we should first compare levels within a country. Wouldn’t a worker on a lower level first compare himself with another on a higher level in his own country? I doubt that he would compare his wages to another of his kind in a different country. Only when he gets on a higher level, he will compare his wages to someone holding a similar job as his in a different country. And here is where trade comes in.

Trade is the activity of selling goods or services in order to make a profit. *A Dictionary of Business and Management*. When a higher-level worker knows he can receive a higher wage in another country, he ‘sells’ his service to them, and is compensated with a higher pay. Fair enough, it benefits him, but how about the local workers of his level? Well, to answer this, it depends on your school of thought. If you’re an Adam Smith believer, you’ll say that’s efficient. If you’re a Karl Marx fan, you’ll say that this causes alienation. For me, I like how Max Weber puts it- just have the right work ethic, that is, work with frugality and diligence!

In conclusion, work and trade plays a crucial part in our social institutions. Thus, on a macro level, we have to know where our citizens are at in the hierarchy of needs. And on the micro level, the most important thing is to have the right work ethic!

 

 

 

Class and Inequalities:A story of one man with a dream of eradicating poverty

He was head of the Economics Department in Chittagong University. A Fulbright scholar with a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, his name was Muhammad Yunus, a citizen of Bangladesh.

Lecturing his students on perfect economic theories, and yet seeing the despair and the destitution of the poor people living around the campus, Muhammad Yunus decided that something was terribly wrong with the economic and social system of Bangladesh. He then embarked on his dream- for the total eradication of poverty in the world.

While visiting the village of Jobra in 1976, he realised that the main predicament of the poor was the unavailability of credit to purchase raw materials. They had to rely on money-lenders and middlemen who charged exorbitant fees. Gathering more information, he found out that there were 42 other people in the village, who needed a total of 856 taka- which was less than $27.

Taking things into his own hands, he forked out $27 from his own pocket and lent it to the villagers. He then approached Janata bank, the largest government bank,for help. However, he found out that banks do not lend money to the poor because they had no collateral. Also, it was generally assumed that the poor will not be able to repay their loans because they would simply use the money for their food and never have the means to repay.

Angered by how banking systems were tailor-made for the literate and rich, Muhammad Yunus then set in his heart to start a credit system that served the poor and not vice-versa. Thus, he started the Grameen Bank in 1976. In 1983,Grameen Bank became established as a formal bank which provides small, collateral-free credit to rural poor people, mainly women, for income-generating activities. Borrowers had to form groups of 5, and they were accountable for each other. Repayment was based on peer pressure, and in a sense, the collective responsiblity of the group served as the loan collateral.

The underlying premise of Grameen Bank is - in order to emerge from poverty and remove themselves from the clutches of usurers and middlemen, landless peasants need access to credit, without which they cannot be expected to launch their own enterprises, however small these may be.

Since then, he has proved the masses wrong. He debunked myths about the poor being unable to use money effectively and being unable to repay their loans. As of July 2005, Grameen Bank disbursed $5.0 bilion in loans to 5.0 million borrowers, 96% of them women, with a repayment rate of 99%. And Grameen’s concept has since been taught and implemented in other countries, for example Bolivia, Mexico, and even in United States. In 2006, Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize.(Source:http://www.grameen-info.org)

Here is an excerpt of Muhammad Yunus’ speech:

Poverty is not caused by the poor people. Poverty is caused by the system we built. Poverty is caused by the policies that we pursue. So if this is my conclusion, I have to prove that it’s true.So I built Grameen Bank, as an institution, a bank, but a different kind of bank… Other banks create poverty, but this bank gets them out of poverty…I’m always asked,”You talk about having a poverty-free world, are you crazy?Even the richest country in the world, United States, they have poor people there.” I said, Look, no matter how rich you get in the present system,you have poor people. So I’m trying to change that system, and in that system, there will be no poor people, because people are as capable as anybody else.

Here is a man who observed poverty his nation, and though they were not in the class of his own, he humbled himself and made sure that they were alleviated out from poverty. Because of him,many are standing on their feet today.

Introduction: Social Problems and Globalization

The main elements in the term ‘globalization’ are ‘integration’, and ‘borderless-world’. And in this 2 key words, we find how globalization has affected social problems.

Let us first look at the issue of integration. Globalization seeks to integrate economies into one, but the complication arises when we are dealing with heterogenous societies. In the 16th century, colonialization was mainly carried out by homogenous societies, for example Britain and later, Japan. In their efforts of integrating nations into one, they focused on the easiness of integrating economies for trade, but failed to look into the social and political context of the nations. Thus, they enforced their economic,social and political institutions on the colonies, on the excuse of bringing their colonies into civilization. In my opinion, they had pre-conceived ideas that their respective institutions, as a whole, would be effective and efficient in their new colonies. Little did they knew the effect they had on the whole society, which were not seen until later on.  

Looking at the current scenario, we see more of social and cultural integration than economic integration. Culture now is not defined only along racial and ethnic lines, but rather, by a group of people who are marked by their similarity of interest and behaviour. For example, now we have the hip-hop culture, the jazz culture, youth cultures, and so on. But then again, there are many sub-cultures in a culture itself, so it’s not appropriate to classify people into different groups, because one can be a member of few cultures. My point is that, most of the social problems that we see now are due to cultural integration. The reason why we cannot get everyone to agree on what is or what is not a social problem, is because everyone views the ‘problem’ differently, based on which culture they are coming from. 

To imitate something good about a culture and then to implement it in our own is not wrong. But the problem begins when someone takes an element from a different culture and tries to ‘implant’ it into an absolutely different culture inappropriately- inappropriate as in, not fitting into the social climate and temperature of the society. It’s like taking a strawberry seed and trying to plant it in the scorching Sahara desert, hoping that it grows into a strawberry jungle.

Globalization has given us many seeds, but we decide where, and how we want to plant the seeds. Ancient globalization has given us many economic seeds, and we are still living with the consequences of the good and bad choices made, for example, now we have poverty and inequality because of the landlord-tenant system in the past where the poor were exploited. But today’s globalization is giving us many social and cultural seeds, and we are still living in times of decision-making. What and how we plant right now will affect our future generations to come.

However, with today’s globalization, things are so much more to our convenience. Knowledge are at our fingertips, and we can effectively access the pros and cons of developing a new system. We can hire specialists and we have an abundance of social scientists to consult with. I feel that ancient globalization has paved the way for all of us to be where we are at right now. Thus, there is no reason why we can live in our own private world and choose to do nothing about current social problems, nor could we try to be ignorant of how our current decisions can cause social problems in the future.

Personal Reflections on Lecture 1

I disagree with the definition that social problems are only social when it affects a significant segment, or a fairly large percentage of the population. To me, there are some things that stand, no matter what society says. The truth stands. A problem becomes social when it goes against foundational truth, regardless of what the society or their leaders define them to be. 

I mean, what happens if a society goes wrong, and the leaders have twisted ideas about what’s right and wrong? Are they free of social problems? Of course not! They have a problem. It’s not something that goes by popular vote, nor by a tyrant mandate. It’s just a matter of truth and lies. 

To me, if I see a problem that seems to trouble no one else, I have no right to remain silent. If I knew the truth and yet failed to voice out, I have failed.

You see, for a problem to be elevated as a social problem, someone has to do something. This someone observes a particular phenomenon in society that differs from the foundational truth, and then decides to do something. And when this notion garners more attention from the rest of society, it ascends to a higher status as a substantial social problem. Here’s something that has strength in numbers. The more people see the problem you highlight, the better. The more the merrier.

Now, do you see the importance of this someone who speaks up? I’ll call this someone an advocate. According to the Oxford dictionary, an advocate is a person who puts a case on someone else’s behalf. 

I am particularly interested in the process advocates go through to put up a case on someone else’s behalf. It’s something to voice out for yourself, but to stand up for others? It takes much more. Here’s a quote from the movie ‘Barnyard’: A strong man stands up for himself; a stronger man stands up for others.

I feel that the world now has so many strong men, but we need stronger men. We need people who would look beyond their own needs, their own lifetime, and their own generation. All of us are called to be advocates. Why? Because we view the world with our personal set of unique lenses. And when the lenses are put together, all that is seen gets magnified. If something slips through my mind, it might not slip through yours. Thus, the more minds we have, the less problems slip away from being acknowledged.

But still, many are called, but few step up to their ‘calling’. Many problems are deprived of their social status because of the lack of advocates. We have here, ‘silent’ social problems.

Reasons why our advocates are being silent, could be that they:

1. Lack initiative- The problem might not bother them directly, so why bother to voice out?

2. Have a predicament speaking up- They are threatened, or will be, once they speak up.

 

The fact that we are living in this era of globalization, and yet we are still resting on our laurels should put us shame. In 1793, William Carey, an English Baptist missionary, went to India and saw a problem. No one else had advocated against the practice of sati - the burning of widows on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands. But William Carey did. He knew the truth, saw the discrepancy between the truth and what was being practiced, and he spoke up. He saw to it that the edict prohibiting sati was passed. He looked beyond his own needs, his own lifetime, and his own generation. He was a real advocate. 

Now that happened in the 18th century. Here we are in the 21st century, with abundance of knowledge and technology. We have a bigger responsibility. Need I say more?