Today’s the day of the career dad and mom! Both work, both sometimes earn equal salaries, and both spend long hours away from home.
“Why do you work such long hours?” I ask.
“Bob, I want my kids to have a better life than I did,” is the reply I get most often.
Let me tell you the story of a young lad called, ‘Johnny the weasel!’
Johnny is fifteen years old, the second youngest in a family of three. He grew up in a large urban area. Johnny is one of those kids who has a room for himself, and most of the things, money can buy, because there’s money enough to buy all he wants.
But at fourteen he was into housebreaking. As he was small and able to squeeze into small spaces the gang to which he belonged called him, ‘the Weasel!’
Next it was into drinking and then into the joy of riding in stolen cars and soon he was well known to the juvenile court and was sent to the reformatory for six months.
His mother and father took time off from their busy schedules to attend the court hearings and pictures in the local papers showed them shocked and angry, “We gave him everything money could buy!” they exclaimed, “We’ve been working our backsides off so that he and his siblings have everything! Why did he do this?”
A block away a new centre was opened by the authorities, it was designed for youngsters who were becoming hardened with crime, here, a team of professionals started studying Johnny, there was a nurse, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a welfare officer, a house father, a house mother and so on.
They spend forty thousand pounds to keep him there. What they found was that if the father and mother had shared a little of the time they had for their jobs with Johnny, if they had been able to give him the love he was looking for, he wouldn’t have grown up with the feeling of rejection, trying to get acceptance from the gang of wrong company he’d walked into.
I see this happening more and more in our developing nation and in households where money becomes the main objective. Sometimes it could also be times spent at parties, instead of with your children, wining and dining rather than putting them to bed with bedtime stories.
And then the children are compensated with toys, games, later fast cars and faster motorbikes and one night when they do something illegal, or parents find they’re into drugs, they cry in disbelief, “How could they do this to us?”
Ask instead, “How could you have done this to them?”
Invest in your children, not just your money, but your time..!

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