Today's Business Lessons
Dinner together
By Francis J. Kong
(The Philippine Star)
Updated September 23, 2012
While economic indicators seem to be positive – and
I’ve spread the good news in our country and even in our OFW communities
in Europe – this troubling fact remains: current reports say that the
Philippines now ranks second in terms of number of teenage pregnancies
and first in terms of number of teenage smokers in South East Asia.
These are statistics I (and I’m sure all parents) don’t like to hear. But heed them we must.
In light of such statistics, Monde Nissin’s advocacy for parents to
regularly spend meal times together with their kids become all the more
relevant, and the recent launch of Famealy Matters, timely.
Famealy Matters (with famealy purposefully spelled as such) is my new
book, a product of my partnership with food company Monde Nissin. It
features 50 stories of notable personalities from various industries and
sectors of the community on how they’ve learned life’s most valuable
lessons through conversations and interactions with their parents around
the dining table.
Nissin has commissioned a body to do a research on the effect of
spending meal times together with the family. They’ve discovered that
kids who spend regular dinner time with their parents have lower
incidents of teenage pregnancy, drug addiction and teenage smoking.
Imagine, just by regularly having dinner with your kids, you can spare
them from the usual troubles of teenagers!
These findings reinforce the ideal that Monde Nissin and Famealy
Matters uphold: kainang pamilya mahalaga! Spending meal times together
as a family is essential!
When I speak to successful entrepreneurs and high-powered
professionals, and I touch on the topic of the family, a serious silence
would permeate the place. I think it’s because, for many of them, the
road to success is littered with “family casualties”.
Sometimes, in our pursuit for success, the family ends up as the
sacrifice offered at the altar of our personal ambitions. The “sacrifice
of the family” doesn’t happen suddenly, dramatically. It is subtle,
almost unnoticeable – a Sunday lunch skipped, a missed soccer game, a
couple of dinners skipped – until one is faced with its consequences:
low grades, school violence, teen pregnancy, drug abuse. The list goes
on.
I’ve met successful people at the peak of their career who look in
the mirror and ask themselves, “What’s the meaning to all this?” Cliché
but true: No amount of success in business or career can ever compensate
for failure in the home.
Spend time with your kids. Have dinner with them. Share life values
around the dinner table to form a generation of achievers who would love
God, love their family and serve the country.
I hope and pray that Famealy Matters will encourage and remind
parents to regularly spend dinner time with their kids. Its benefits are
tremendous; overlooking it leads to dire consequences. What could be a
better argument for it than this, I wonder?
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