In our case, my late wife Vicky and I have been volunteers for the Center for Family Ministry since 1990 and we’ve been doing outreach programs in various depressed communities and public schools. We’ve also been a volunteer with the Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court in the 70s and 80s and we’ve conducted interaction and organization training in many squatter areas. Our experience made us realize that we really need to have something like what the RH Bill aims to do to teach responsible parenthood and better interpersonal relationships. In a first world society, we might not need this. But for a very poor country like ours, we need it badly. The poor just breed children without knowing how to rear them properly. We’ve met several families where there are already 10 to 12 children but the mother, who usually starts giving birth in her teens, still continue to bear babies even if they can’t give proper nutrition and education to their kids. The children from these deprived families usually grow up to be burdens of society. Lacking in adequate education, they also suffer the same fate of their parents, cohabiting with partners while still in their teens, a matter of children having their own children often without the sacrament of marriage. Among the educated classes, they’re more cautious in starting their own families. College graduates usually get married later than their unschooled counterparts and know that they should only have kids they can maintain and educate properly. But in both little educated and better educated classes, we’ve discovered that there’s a dismal lack of knowledge in teeners about interpersonal relationships. During open forums, high school students open up and ask us questions about love affairs and sex that they’re ashamed to ask their parents. And this is where a good teacher can come in to help guide them. Otherwise, they often get whatever knowledge they have about relationships from their classmates or worse, from the media or false role models like celebrities who often get into messy affairs themselves. Those who are against the RH Bill obviously do not have first-hand experience on the reality situation about these matters. How we wish they’d also do volunteer work among the poorest of the poor to help open up their eyes and minds.
