Almost 40 percent of children in Taiwan said that they had an “uneasy” relationship with their parents, who tend to be too busy with work, the Children’s Welfare League Foundation (CWLF) said yesterday.
A survey conducted by the foundation in January with more than 1,500 valid samples from children in the fifth and the sixth grades, randomly selected across the nation, showed that as many as 38 percent of children said they did not feel relations at home were “warm.”
Among them, 18 percent said they were under constant pressure at home, 13 percent said they suffered from a “cold” relationship with their parents, while 10 percent said their relationship with their parents was “sometimes good, sometimes bad.”
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
“The family should be a place that makes the children feel ‘warm’ and acts as a shelter for them,” foundation executive director Alicia Wang (王育敏) told a press conference in Taipei held to release the results of the survey.
“What we found in this survey is worrying,” she said.
When the survey asked further questions to determine the reason why children felt as they did, it was discovered that children believed their uneasy relationship with their parents was the result of their parents being too busy at work and not spending enough time with them.
About 35 percent of respondents said their parents did not come home from work until after 8pm. Of that number, close to 20 percent said their fathers usually came home after 9pm, while about 10 percent said their mothers would come home after 9pm.
“As a result, parents are too busy to have dinner with their children and a lot of them are just too tired to spend time with their kids,” Wang said. “About 50 percent of respondents said they spent less than 30 minutes talking with their parents every day and more than 20 percent said that they spent on average less than 10 minutes talking to their parents every day.”
When parents did talk with their children, Wang said, they mostly talked about schoolwork or grades.
“Parents seem to have little interest in listening to their children talk about some of the problems they might be experiencing,” she said.
In addition, 71 percent of children said they were able to tell their mother about their concerns, while 60.6 said they felt at ease doing so with their father.
Although those percentages seem high, they are still lower than the 75 percent and 89 percent respectively reported in -Europe, the survey said.
“Comparing the results in 2000 and 2011, we have found that parents spend even less time doing leisure activities with their children nowadays,” Wang said.
She added that 20 percent fewer parents spent time with their children shopping, hiking or camping, while 10 percent fewer were spending time watching movies with their children.
“We are worried about these findings and urge parents to hug their children for at least 30 seconds, spend at least 30 minutes talking with them and, starting today, avoid working overtime on Wednesdays,” Wang said.
“We call on employers to allow their employees to not work overtime on Wednesdays,” she said.
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