Consumerism is sending the Vietnamese family into crisis
Ho Chi Minh City (AsiaNews) - Economic development, to which Vietnam opened itself in 1987, has also brought consumerism along with it: it is more and more frequent for parents to be preoccupied with material well-being, and overlook moral formation. The "dream" of money and prosperity is provoking an acute crisis of the family system. The statistics from six provinces of the country demonstrate that the rate of divorce is rapidly increasing: from 1987 to 1994, this 60,556 families have divorced, with the consequent internal conflicts.
A social worker has written in a government newspaper that "in the eventful atmosphere of the market mechanism, many people want to have jobs, increasing incomes, raising standards and quality of life. At the same time the consumerism and modern age are affecting the moral foundation of families. So the morality of family is being downgraded. When parents divorce, women and children suffer mistreatment or violence in the family. In Hanoi, among 23,738 cases of divorce, there were 7,372 cases of women hit and maltreated. That is an incidence of 31%. With the same causes, in Haiphong the rate was 30%, 41% in Nghe An province, 60% in Tuyen Quang province".
Fr Paul, of the archdiocese of Ho Chi Minh City, emphasises that "Vietnam has been developing its economy, focusing only on material development, and this is leading to unbalanced development on values, traditional culture and human development. Moreover, now the phenomenon of ignoring family education is happening more and more. This has caused broken families. Parents just focus on material goods, food, or following scholastic achievements for their children. They have bypassed the education of human values of the individual, and the way of behaviour with other persons. This is causing many negative results for families. They let money dominate them. All the issues are causing broken families and domestic violence for women and children. Living in this way, many parents have no time to take care of their children. So their children lack spiritual orientation and human education".
The newspaper Tia Sang wrote in April that "Now the gap between rich and poor is growing larger and larger. Vietnam has not yet found the rooted way of living that it is suitable for its social structure. So we need have a clear and pure management system. In the future, we hope that we will have a new generation with talents and morality in living".
"The family", professor Tuan of Open University tells AsiaNews, "is the cell of the society. The government lacks social policies, social welfare and social services to help people inthe poor communities. To supplement for the government's social services, the Church has organised many social activities for the poor, developing social groups to work with people in depressed communities and remote communities of the parishes".
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