What is the true state of Filipino children?
In the educational system, K to 12 promised that those who would finish senior would be employable.
We still need to see empirical evidence of that. Many employers in the country have kept a college degree among the qualifications they require in new hires.
Amid the onslaught of the digital, our children remain vulnerable to perverted predators in cybersex rings who have turned the internet into a weapon to snare the innocent.
In the area of nourishment, wrong notions about what to feed children and the increase in food prices are projected to push child malnutrition figures to very high levels.
Within the government’s campaign against illegal drugs, more than 70 children have been liquidated. No justice is in sight for many of those who perished.
In the project to make our communities safer for children, they themselves have become targets with legislators willing to treat them like criminals at a younger age.
So much for creating a better world for our children?
Voters in May 2019 should be meticulous in evaluating the record of the veterans and ascertaining the integrity of neophytes in elected office in taking care of Filipino boys and girls.
The expertise of our practitioners in health and psychology has yet to be fully harnessed in improving child care from the cradle onward.
Large numbers of Filipinos become parents and engage in methods of parenting handed down from their own parents that in the face of new findings about child-rearing contain much room for improvement.
Take for instance the seemingly innocuous question of exposing children to gadgets like smartphones.
Too much exposure at a young age would be detrimental to their intellectual development and mental well-being.
Yet little has been done in the way of tapping the experts to give parents workable guidelines for forming the digital natives in the home.
The challenges to the lives of children that we have enumerated in a list that is by no means exhaustive will be surmounted with the help of leaders who have more than just political maturity to bring the resources of the state to bear on children’s welfare.
Let us elect the ones whose compassion has given them the foresight to think of the future not in terms of figures and calculations only, but more importantly in terms of a world where the citizens we are forming in homes and schools today will not be left with an heirloom of unnecessary suffering.