Filial Piety

These days, there is a new TV ad to tell people how to show filial piety.

In this ad, it showed that the old grandmother was very hard to please when she moved to live with her son and his family. The daughter-in-law tried to please her too but was hurt whenever she commented negatively about the things she did. The grandson saw all this and found it very disgusting. One day, the grandmother was hospitalized and in serious condition. The grandson asked his father why he needed to treat her so well since she treated them badly when she was well and kicking. The son remembered a time when he was sick and his mother had to rush him to hospital under the rain. When they reached the hospital, the mother was all drenched. While waiting for the doctor, she sang her the song, 'Tian hey hey'. The son then woke up. As he remembered this scene, he sang the same song to his mother.

This ad taught me something. When an elderly parent comes to stay with the children, there will definitely be inconvenience. Not only must the elderly parent try to adapt to the children, the children's family also need to adapt to the parent. Tension will then arise. But as the golden wordings says, 'When there is an elderly at home, there is gold/treasure.' However, this is the opposite of today. In the area where I serve, many stories of elderly parents being neglected by their children who are well-to-do. Some elderly found that it was stupid of them to dote their children so much and in the end, they were being treated like dirt. Some children feel that if they give their parents money, it is filial piety. However, these elderly need company, someone that they can talk to, someone who dotes them. These cannot be replaced by outsiders. Only a fresh and blood children can comfort them.

Of course, there is another group of children who really treat their elderly parents well. They give them not only allowances but also bring them to eat, visit them regularly and take them to tours. This is good but the elderly parents sometimes become overly proud and begin to exploit charitable organizations. When they are in charitable organizations, they will despise other elderly whose situation is worst than them. Then when the organizations give donated items, they complain that they receive too little or never receive at all or receive poor quality items. Some even appear poor in order to get these donated items and sell it to someone else. Such actions are really absurd. But this is the way life is.

Whatever it is, filial piety is not something that we can coach. It comes from observation. We observe how our parents treat their parents and in turn we learn how to treat our parents. This is learned behaviour. If our parents treat their parents badly, the vicious cycle will continue until someone along the family line decides to stop it. May God guide us in treating our parents well.