I think we can all attest to the fact that we now live in a new day and time – one different from our parents, and much further from that of our grand and great-grandparents. As we adjust to the new millennium way of living, we have undoubtedly lost a lot of what our previous generations fought so hard to instill in us, particularly as it relates to the home and family values.

I can remember a time when I was at my grandparents house and I closed my bedroom door because I thought I needed some “privacy”. Well let me just say that was the last bedroom door I closed at their house unless it was theirs. Trust and believe I was on the outside and they were on the in! But in households today, it is common for the children to close themselves off from the family, indulging in their own vices and venues. Count it on one hand how many of our families still share the same dining room table at the same time, during the same meal.

Thinking back to when it first hit the news that as early as elementary schools would be installing metal detectors, and making it a school rule to have see-through backpacks; and I thought that was a stretch. Please! That was a light-weight challenge and as a parent, the least of my worries. Now, it is almost as common as pedophilia for kids and young adults alike to go to school on a shooting rampage before killing themselves. What have we been reduced to, a society in which our children have a lack of responsibility and accountability? Are we now a nation okay with our youth taking their frustrations and failures out on others before ending their own misery? I hear it more times than not that “the reason for our moral failure is due to the removal of prayer in the schools.” Well for a brief moment I will support that statement, but only for a brief moment, because charity and all of its fruitful cousins like respect, integrity and common courtesy, starts at home.

This is not to say that there are bad parents or good parents with bad parenting abilities. Ultimately we teach what we know, and in some cases we are products of our environments. What it is saying is that we have to take on a little more responsibility and go back to what was good, right and pure about our own teachings and pass them along to our kids. If that was happening, honestly the same level of standards would be passed along as well. It is quite unfortunate, but grandparents of today are as young as 30 – hardly old enough to know their own way and now having to find the way for a child, a grandchild and for themselves.

Let’s open up the doors at home and reinvent the meaning of family time. Let’s commit to having at least one meal at the dining room table together. Let’s set limits and boundaries with consequences so the authorities in the streets won’t have to. Let’s establish some guidelines and standards for accountability and responsibility. Is this the solution? Not in its entirety. But guaranteed, it is a step in the right direction. Rome was not built in a day, but the decision to build it was. Sounds like its decision time.