The Filipino Family Confronts the Modern World

This article focuses on the changes that Filipino Family encounters because of the fast development of technology that affects our entire life. The Filipino Family has had to confront the pressures of modernization and constantly redefine its role in a rapidly changing society. Varied though the responses have been, they all reflect one theme – rising aspirations. For the masses this means an awakening desire to divert material benefits currently out of reach into their range of acquisition. The family symbolizes anxiety and security. On the one hand, it embraces its members lovingly and without reservation. On the other, it creates crises for them by inculcating norms and behaviors often in conflict with the standards of other sectors of society. Preparing a child for his adult place in society and maintaining that integration, once made, constitute the major daily concerns of family life. Overall patterns of similarity are discernible and merit consideration as crucial to an understanding of the family in modern Philippine life namely:

1) The Roles of Men and Women; 2) The Parent-Child Relationship; 3) Extended Kinship and the Nuclear Family. First was the Role of Men and Women, the stereotyped view of the Filipina’s role in her society is primarily that of the solicitous mother guarding the interests of her many children and watchful lest her husband be distracted from the primary task of devoting his income to the unit’s welfare. Man is the pivotal member. As a symbolic head, the family establishes its unity and identity. Leadership, discipline over children, and the voicing of decisions are male prerogatives, with the wife acting as helpmate. His earnings provide the baseline for economic security, while the contacts he develops with others in the larger society can make or break the family fortunes. The woman, on the other hand, holds the family together by managing the household and directing the lives of its members.

This means handling only the routine tasks of household and childcare. If she aspires to a level of living higher than her husband’s capacity to provide, the burden rests upon her to find a way of achieving her ambitions. The religious side of family life falls to his wife. She represents both of them before God by fervently participating in religious rituals. In effect, she prays for two, her piety making up for both her own and her husband’s failings. A prayerful wife doubles as her husband’s insurance policy for a place in heaven. In terms of educational qualifications the national percentage of girls among elementary and high school graduates is only slightly lower than that of boys. While more men than women enter college, the sex composition reverses by graduation time. More women than men obtain a college degree, a ratio that persists into the graduate level. A family’s survival and well-being may depend on its male’s socio-political talents.

Hence, the female’s opportunity to manage resources is derivative of the male’s more basis accomplishment of obtaining those resources in the first place through forging interdependent linkages between the powerful rich and powerless poor, or among social peers. Next was the Parent-Child Relationship. One school of thought holds that defiant youth reflect not so much a justified frustration with the state of the nation, but rather laxity on the part of their parents. A lack of love, discipline, or guidance is cited as responsible for this recalcitrant activist generation. Guthrie and Jacobs elaborate on intrasociety differences in their data on mothers’ comparisons of how they were raised, with their mother’s child-rearing techniques. The better-educated women tend to avoid superstitious practices and use more current knowledge about children than do the less-educated women. In the Philippines, parents not only view children as extensions of themselves: they also feel compelled to make sacrifices for their offspring, having brought them into the world.

The children are in turn, expected to be eternally grateful for this unsolicited gift of life. Christian Filipinos describes the ideal child as above all, considerate of his parents, which means, for the most part, being deferential to them. Beyond this, he should be diligent in his studies and work. Sons should strive to avoid falling into bad ways while daughters should both do this and grow closer to God in faith and piety. Lastly were the Extended Kinship and the Nuclear Family. Filipinos accept their family as an end in itself, the basic unit that provides emotional closeness and security to the individual. Kinsmen, on the other hand, fall into a more vulnerable category. Classified beyond the nuclear unit, they are sometimes viewed as unnecessary components in certain economic and political situations. Although the kinship model enjoys popular support as an analytical concept for the Filipino groupings, it needs extensive modification. For relatives do not always come first in the choice of whom one prefers to deal with.

Extended kinship ties retain their significance in so far as they are functional in the society and provided alternative nonkin groupings remain generally unavailable. Although kin-based economic and political arrangements may decline in the face of more productive, merit-oriented non-kin arrangements, their enduring contributions to the emotional needs of the individual remain unchallenged. The challenge to the older generation will be to understand what youth seeks and to cope with these goals in the context of the entire society’s needs. The point of its theoretical foundation was based on fast changes in our society that mainly affect the relationship of the family. They interviewed some families and they use it to write this article. They explain the role of men and women, the parent-child relationship and the extended kinship and the nuclear family based on the results of their interview. The main thesis of the article is how can the Filipino family confronts the modern world, how can they cope with the changes in their environment and how can it affect their family relationship. The principle that is present in the article is present in the Philippine context in a way that changes in our environment affect of how the family interacts with one another.