La Famia Introduction

The La Famia Foundation NZ is a charitable trust established to provide funding and expertise toward the nurturing and strengthening of the human family, one family and one community at a time.

Much has changed over the last half century since the days of traditional family upbringing and training, and with these changes has brought new methods of childrearing and family care.  The most prominent change is the choice of mothers to be actively employed, and role model opportunities for men and women to interchange their standards of employment to a less stereo typed, more neutral gender based work force. 

As a result of these changes in roles, a paradigm shift has occurred in the family structure where the working mums are no longer at home full time to raise the children and manage the home and many pre-school children are placed in predominately institutionalised neighbourhood day care centres during the typical five day work week. Although the Australasian statistics vary from the US, it may be relevant to point out the following trends as an indicator of where developed societies are headed:

• By 1985, 50% of women with children under three years old were in the full time work force (US Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• By 1996, 57% of women with children under three years old were in the work force with 60% working with children under 6 years of age
• Of the childcare centres these children attended, only one in 10 children were receiving high enough quality care to enhance their development. (Children’s defence Fund, 1996)

This shift from mum-care at home to employee pre-school day-care in neighbourhood centres has brought about some interesting results where studies now show that the critical time for children’s emotional and intellectual development is from birth to five years. With the neighbourhood day care centres unable to provide substantial one-on-one parental nurturing and intimate interactions that foster the parent/child bonding and thereby reinforcing the child’s mental and emotional development during this critical period, many children are entering the public education system somewhat less equipped to meet the social and intellectual challenges ahead of them.

This has placed an additional burden on the public education system to provide even the most basic of training on standards of right and wrong and counselling for mental and emotional difficulties as well as additional conference time with parents to address behavioural issues at school.

For the youth growing up with such challenges at home and in the school systems, the elevated incidence of youth offending are apparent and the burden on government policing and agency counselling are most certainly on the increase. The challenges now born out of this new system of raising our children via institutional day care standards and leaving the working parents with somewhat diminished responsibility and authority in dealing with the resultant behavioural complications in many of our children has become a foundational family issue.   A closer look at this issue at the community level may provide some insight as to the related opportunities we have to create a community solution under the umbrella of the La Famia Family Management concept.