Children, The Family and Health: What it Takes to Give Children Long Life
The Hawaii Workshop: Our distinguished PPSEAWA members
It is my great pleasure to be here and to share with you my experience as a mother to take care of my child’s health. As a working mother, it is always challenging to me to balance my workload and taking care of my family.
My daughter doesn’t have good eating habit. She likes to eat a lot of junk food such as french fries, hamburgers, and pizzas. And also I as a working mother do not have enough time to cook dinner every night. I guess I have time to cook dinner but I don’t because my child is spoiled to the all kinds of junk food and doesn’t like the meal I prepared. I am not happy about this trends. It seems to me we are losing our family culture gradually.
Fortunately my child is not having any concerned health problems but some of unfortunate children in low income families are suffering from having appropriate balanced diet every day. I heard news from newspaper that over 18,000 students around the country go to school without eating their breakfasts because of financial crisis in their families. As a mother of one child, it is so sad to hear that news. I think some of kids in our country are in dangerous situation in nutritional standpoint.
The other thing I want to talk about is how important parents’s attention is to their children’s life. When my daughter was in kindergarten, she was very interested in playing piano. She took so much time to practice what she was supposed to do. At that time I was so busy catching up my workload and didn’t have chance to enjoy listening what she was playing. One day she told me that big piano concert would be coming up soon and every parents should be there by 7 o’clock. I didn’t listened carefully and didn’t say yes to her immediately. But she was assuming that I would be there without any doubt. On that day I had some problem at my workplace and had to do overtime work. I totally forgot about my daughter’s concert. Finally I missed the most precious moment in my daughter’s life and my life too. She was so sad and full of tears were filled in her eyes.
From that time she lost her interest in playing piano and she doesn’t want to play piano and I could hardly hear her playing. So I learned valuable lesson from my daughter. How important my attention is to my child. I am pretty sure that every parents are the most significant person in our children’s life. Also realized that our children are our most valuable gift from God.
Last Modified: November 29, 2002