By Michael Findlay, Star Writer

Recently, our honourable Prime Minister, Portia Simpson Miller called on the Church to come onboard with her in promoting family values as a means of stemming the decay in the moral life of the nation. This is in my view, a strange request since the Church has always promoted family values. And it is the Government, not the church, that should come on board in addressing this issue.

The Government has always been talking about family values without much action. In the 90s, P.J. Patterson came up with the idea of promoting values and attitudes as a means of solving the social morass that this country had got into, but what is the status of that programme? Where has it got us? The situation seems to have worsened, and so our P.M. seemed to have revamped that old idea by turning to an institution which has been "crying in the wilderness" for such a movement in order to prevent a social explosion.

With the rise in violence and general indiscipline by our youths as expressed in the education system, the sociologists and other experts blame the situation on a decline in family values. They will tell you that the family is the building block of a nation's morals and values. If there is a breakdown in this institution, then it will be expressed in our social life.

The Prime Minister has recog-nised this problem, maybe a little too late and so in a type of desperation has now called on the Church which has been like a "beating stick" when things go wrong in society. It is common to hear people say "well what is the Church doing about it". But, the Church with its limited resources has always been there trying to do what it can. It will take, however, an orchestrated effort from the Church, the state and society in general to solve the problem of social decay, which has expressed itself in rampant crime and violence in our schools and society at large. To deal with this problem, we have to go back to the deterioration of our family structure and the breakdown in values and attitudes in our communities. We must return the primary socialisation role of our children to the family. The situation where the elderly and children are running households due to migration of parents must stop.

This is where the Government comes in, as the state of the economy is the primary factor for this. If we have a striving economic system, where jobs are available then without doubt the crime situation would go down as this has been proven in surveys with responsible parents in households, the situation of discipline would be addressed and the churches would then play a role in promoting religious values which will definitely affect how people think and act.

So madam Prime Minister, your problem would be solved but the Government must do what it is there to be done. That among other things includes creating law and order and produce a well run economy that will assist in creating proper values and attitudes in the family and by extension the society as a whole.