The Global Day of Parents on 1 June is the lesser-known cousin of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Like them it celebrates people for their vital and often unnoticed contributions to their families and society and honours their self-sacrificing lives.
The day also invites us to recognise how many forms of parenting are found in our society. We might at first imagine parents as a mother and father living in a house with their own children. That is certainly common. Many children, however, are raised by single parents. Many other children live with their birth mother or father and their unrelated partner. In other families, children are raised by parents of birth and successive parents, and in some by parents of the same sex. Many children, too, are placed in the care of unrelated parents because their birth parents could not care for them.
In each of these different shapes of parenting some children will grow to live happy and responsible lives. For other children, their experience of parenting is one of neglect or mistreatment. We may believe that the traditional family is the best form of parenting, but we should respect persons in different forms of relationship.
SOCIETAL BENEFITS
Parents Day also reminds us of the benefit that parents bring to society. It comes at a cost. In purely economic terms to raise a child means sacrificing the wealth people may gain by remaining single. It may also mean having a more limited career. Bearing children, too, demands sacrificing opportunities at many levels. It means losing sleep in the early years of childbearing. It may mean limiting one’s social life in order to care for children at home and giving up opportunities for overseas travel, for sport and for hobbies. Such sacrifice may be cheerfully accepted out of love, but it is significant.
The community as a whole relies on good parenting for its health. It helps children to grow into good citizens who can take responsibility for their lives and contribute to society. Relationships within the family and the example and counsel of parents help children set their own desires within the framework of the good of the family. Healthy parenting is the seedbed of a future healthy society that prizes the common good. Within the Church, too, parents ideally communicate the faith to their children. The family is the community of the Church in miniature. In it, people come to respect a world loved by God, the importance of ritual, and a generous way of life.
HELP REQUIRED
If parents are such a central building block in society, they need help in their work. The theme of Parents Day (2025) this year is Raising Parents. It suggests the importance of grandparents and others in helping parents, particularly those who have had a difficult childhood. A good society will also support them by ensuring that working conditions allow the time and the rest that parents need to attend to the family. Parents whose members live with disadvantage, too, must be supported by a coordinated social welfare framework that provides them and their children with coordinated medical care, social help, education. The support given to families will help for a lifetime.
Finally, and above all, the Global Day of Parents is a time simply to celebrate the joys of family life. These make worthwhile the hardships, disappointments and sacrifices involved in raising families. Being parents is a joy as well as being a responsibility, a service and a sacrifice.