Over time, family culture has contributed to Malta’s welfare. It did so economically, politically and socially more so in matters of education and character formation. Practically all Maltese families regard children as a treasure. Numerous children are a confirmation of marriages, giving promise of permanence to their vows. Numerous children also reinforce the unity of extended families.
The Catholic principle of ‘Crescete et multiplicative’ has lost much of the power it previously held. Economic stringencies and educational demands have imposed strictness on birth control. So family culture has suffered changes: extended families gave birth to nuclear families and fragmentation.
A personal life episode exemplifies the universal change.
My parents had eight children; none of us brothers and sisters has more than three.
This gradual decrease from generation to generation is now evident in the rate of population growth which has dwindled down to dangerous levels.
Yet the love of children has remained constantly predominant. Parents often reveal an urge of making their children better educated than they were: they oversee their studies; keep in touch with teachers; send them to private tuition; and laud them to the heavens in conversation.
Church institutions run schools and orphanages for less fortunate children.
Governments also play their part. They control their education from pre-kindergarten classes to tertiary education even helping students financially. Unfortunately, legislation has fragmented traditional unity.
Mothers remain the predominant divas of family culture. They are often equated with self-sacrifice and passionate love. I recall mother trekking all the way from Rabat to Mtaħleb to exchange the few gold trinkets she owned for potatoes during wartime starvation. Selflessly she spent nights watching over feverish patients in delirium, Oh how she cried on losing baby Paul suffering suffocation from whooping cough!
Mothers also solve financial problems, turning parsimonious when fathers’ irregular income depends on fortuitous employment. “Those were the days, my friend epidemics, poverty, starvation, destruction.
Children are now pampered with God’s plenty. Yet mothers still exert discipline of moral and religious behaviour.
Mothers are the fulcrum and the nodal figures on whom rests Malta’s progress towards social well-being. Praiseworthy values of family culture ensure stability.
Unfortunately, in copying other countries, Malta has overstepped the rules of democratic principles: searching for freedom it has overstepped the rules of moral precepts.