Get families to start talking again
Rosanna Wong says in far too many Hong Kong families, the pace of modern living and the prevalent use of electronic gadgets are getting in the way of healthy parent-child communication
Hong Kong was recently shocked by three murders uncovered over the course of three days. For a city that prides itself on having one of the lowest homicide rates in the world - police statistics show 27 last year - it is not surprising that much public anguish arose as a result. People, especially through social media, blogs and radio talk shows, desperately sought to find explanations of the hows and whys. Reasons postulated included internet addiction, poverty and parent-child conflict.
This paper carried out an online poll asking whether the "spate of gruesome murders within families signal a crisis in Hong Kong's family values". It was perhaps more than a little alarmist to make such a sweeping connection, but even more surprising was that 76 per cent of respondents answered "yes".
Each case is unique and we really have no way of knowing the definitive reason for the family violence. We are not party to the internal situations within each family that might have led to accumulated anger or caused someone to lash out.
However, whether or not a "breakdown of family values" was to blame, clearly there is deep public concern about the state of familial relations in the city.
Our modern world is in constant flux. Not only are our lives busier and more competitive than even a generation ago, the extent to which we all rely on technology as our main source of information, communication and even leisure is frightening.
So caught up in the virtual and real-time world through smaller and smaller screens, we have lost or are losing our ability to engage people directly, face to face. This is a dilemma that I see growing particularly among young people, whose lives today revolve around technological devices.
These youth are far more comfortable with their fingers doing the talking, through abbreviated forms of text speech and blogs, than they are through verbal communication. They are far readier to post an opinion through a tweet than they are with constructing an argument. They are also far less able to handle verbal criticism and reprimand; it's much easier to delete a critical e-mail or block out a perceived foe in social media. When this is coupled with the fact that parents themselves very often have work lives that leave them with little time to spend with their children, it adds to the disappearance of nurturing family relationships.