Celebrating healthy families

Ghana joins the rest of the world on Friday, May 15, to mark International Family Day, a day set aside to celebrate the values and importance of families.

It is a fact that families constitute the building blocks of society and, by extension, there is a direct correlation between the state of a nation and the quality of families within it.

Studies have found that family dysfunction has enduring and unfavourable health consequences for its members. For example, girls whose fathers left the families early in their lives had the highest rate of early sexual activity and adolescent pregnancy.

The Mirror, as a family newspaper, has, over 60 plus years, sought, through its mission as a complete weekend newspaper with something for all members of the family, to champion, espouse and promote healthy family life. 

We acknowledge the fact that a number of programmes have been implemented, while others are underway, by governmental and non-governmental agencies to engender healthy families, but it is time we acknowledged the fact that nobody can build a healthy family for any household unless we make a conscious effort to inculcate the value of family life in especially the young ones in their formative period. 

After all it is said that charity begins at home.

Also, every child needs both parents to ensure balanced development, hence the need for those parents and guardians who have shirked their responsibilities to reconsider their behaviour and take up their roles once more to help build morally strong families in particular and societies and nations as a whole. 

The Mirror, therefore, adds its voice to the call by the Founder of Family Matters Foundation Ghana, Mrs Irene Lorwia-Zakpaa, to parents to desist from ‘selling off’ their children to serve as slaves for the rich whose values or orientations are unknown and mostly do not help the children’s proper upbringing. 

It is also very important to consider her suggestion to intensify efforts to equip breadwinners with income-generating skills as a way of reducing the rate at which people give their children away.

Certainly it is important to ensure that families are kept together, so that they could pass good values to the younger generation.

On that note, The Mirror wishes to commend SOS Children’s Villages, Ghana for celebrating the day and especially for providing a safe haven for orphans who otherwise would have been left without families.