Money instead of parents!

I always ask myself: what do parents want to offer their children when they decide to go abroad? Some pieces of paper called dollars and euros that can offer parental love even when they are away? That would mean that we can call dollars – father and euro – mother, and that’s how we solve the problem. 

Unfortunately, this is how those parents who go and leave their children without supervision solve the problem, believing that all their child needs is money and nothing more important. I ask myself again, is there a child who would exchange parents for money?

This question has become a really serious problem, and the situation that has arisen so far has become very worrying. Reading the study ”The situation of children left without parental care after migration,” conducted by UNICEF Moldova and CIDDC, I was shocked by its result.

Migration in the country is increasing day by day, and with migration the number of children left without parents increases. This is a real correlation, those who migrate are the parents and those who remain are the children of these parents, but also the children of our country. To better understand the situation, I will write only a few statistics copied from the study conducted by UNICEF.

If in the year 2000 children without both parents were only two percent, in 2005 this number was seven percent. In 2000, 18 percent were registered, children without one parent, in five years their rate was 31 percent. The results of the study show that these children appreciate their parents’ efforts to earn money, but at the same time distance themselves from them in the absence of moral support and communication. 

The truth is that I am one of the children who is part of these statistics. From the age of 11 I stayed alone with my mother at home, my father going abroad to work for 5 years, and I can’t lie and say that I wasn’t glad for his departure, especially because of the money. Suddenly I thought I would have everything, maybe later a car, thus developing big dreams in my mind, and I’m not saying I’ve missed anything material since he left, but I’d be lying if I said nothing has changed in my life since then.

At first it seemed good, I was the same good boy, obedient, with good grades in school, but somewhere I stumbled badly. At the age of 14 I tasted for the first time what it means to be drunk, at the same age I went to the disco for the first time, and also at this age I put the cigarette on my lips for the first time, I became someone else. I am sure that these words are not foreign to young people, especially those have parents abroad. No one can replace parents just as no one can replace the country in which you live, and the education you receive from your parents cannot be compared to the education at school or from your grandparents.

As for me, I’m glad that I have now understood all these things and changed by studying the Bible and believing in the Lord Jesus. I also have teachers who have gone through situations like me, and they helped me get over these vices that started to destroy my life even from an early age.

Remember that every child wants to be with his parents, and no dollar can replace the father and no euro can replace the mother, they are unique to us, and a child develops best only with his parents. If we all understood this message then there would be a change in our world.
Ion Druță

Translated by Liza Bîrlădeanu