Living in the 21st century mode, modern lifestyle has become the main agenda.

One
can never be parted of indulging into modern lifestyle. According to Swasti Raizada, as cited
in her article titled Effect On Children When Both Parents Are Employed, in this fast
moving forward world, with, standards of living are very much demanding, a single earning
parent can only contribute like a drop in the mammoth bucket of expenses making it almost
mandatory for both the parents to play a vital role of bread-winners for their healthy
sustenance. According to Cambridge Thesaurus Dictionary, lifestyle means someones way of
living; the things that a person or a particular group usually do. However, there is always a
price to pay for every modernity lifestyle we are enduring at the moment. As a consequence
to adapting the modern lifestyle into account, parents nowadays spend less time with their
children. Research has been conducted subsequent to the parents spending so little time with
their children due to the demanding modern lifestyle they are enduring. As to seek for the
cause and effect due to this matter, the resuming write up will explore the cause and further
presenting the effects of the issue.
According to a survey conducted by the Daily Mail, of 2 000 parents with the children
aged between three to eighteen years old find it hard to switch off from work mode and spend
quality time with their children which resulted in lack of concentration and focus on the
neglected children. One of the main reasons is the demanding work load burdened onto the
parents shoulder. As we are aware of, parents nowadays both have careers. In the past, only
the man carried the burden of working and workload while women stayed at home and took
care of the children. Women were advised or shall we say obliged to stay at home and raised
the children appropriately. Their jobs were to fulfill the responsibility to take care of the
children and to carry out the house chores. The children were well taken of both physically
and emotionally as they had full attention from their mother. When the father returned home
from work, they could have dinner together and spent quality time talking to each other.
Therefore, childrens attitudes were still tolerable and still at hands. Even though there was
still few percentage of childs problem issue, but the percentage was still tolerable. Currently,
in the modern living lifestyle, the situation is reversed. Even mothers go to work too to
support the need of highly increasing living costs. According to K. Parker and W. Wendy
(2013) in their article titled Roles of Moms and Dads Converge as They Balance Work and
Family, mothers attitudes toward work have changed considerably in recent years. Among
mothers with children under age 18, the share saying they would prefer to work full time has
increased from 20% in 2007 to 32% in 2012. Tough economic times may have ushered in a

new mindset, as women in the most difficult financial circumstances are among the most
likely to say working full time is the ideal situation for them. As a result to the changing tide,
the children have to spend less time with their parents compared to the before children.
Having both parents working produced fair opportunity for the children to enjoy dinner
together or have a quality conversation with the parents. Due to the work demand which
needs to be fulfilled by their parents, neither the children get to spend time enjoying meal
together nor doing recreational stuff with their parents. Thus, children feel neglected all the
time. They are abandoned physically and the worst case scenario, abandoned emotionally.
Children with less affection from parents have the tendency to become furious or even
depressed. They create problems either at home or even school as a result from poor
affections obtained from their parents. Their intention is just to seek for attention from their
parents. Basically, the children will become a quiet person with no self-confidence. They
could also become stubborn and naughty. A family institution is at stake due to parents
devotion and attention to workload at the workplace and not to the children. Naturally,
children are supposed to be given extra care and attention especially in the infant age. It
continues in the adolescent age, still affection, love and quality time ought to be spent with
the precious children. Reducing in the time spent with the children can cause problem to a
family institution. It will be so sad if parents could not make time to attend their children
report cards day or even a concert or a play. The children will surely feel secluded and sad
for not being an important person in their parents lives. This might initiate anger towards
their parents which might result in less respect towards their parents. Children at an early
stage still could not comprehend the need for the parents as bread-winners of the family. So,
whenever they are neglected, they will assume that their parents prefer work compared to
them which might spark up conflict among the children. Therefore, parents will are unable to
monitor the childrens development mentally and physically. They will miss out the
importance of their childrens growth and achievement. Parents are not aware of their
education and how much they are adapting to their school environment. Children might face
peer rivalry and siblings rivalry without the parents concern. These are the important stages
in childrens life which parents should not miss. Sadly, most parents are missing out these
progresses and changes from adolescent to teenager. Apart from that, with lack of time
provided at home with the children, parents might experience children with health problems.
This is because nobody is at home to monitor the childrens nutrition. They eat unbalanced
food which contributes to health disease. Children tend to eat a lot of junk food without
parents supervision which obviously not good for the children. Children tend to develop bad

eating habit. Once they are used to the bad eating habit, it is almost impossible to stop. Thus,
it will cause to producing children with lack of nutrition and they will not perform
outstandingly in the classroom or even in school.
The second reason that causes the parents to devote little time for their children is due
to the current technology gadgets. Nowadays, almost everybody is totally linked with
technology and internet and parents cant almost switch off their gadgets. They reach for an
iPhone or Blackberry first thing in the morning and the final thing in the evening, and
countless time during the day. Parents visit their Facebook page to see more updates and they
become gradually changing their lifestyles to social networking. Parents get involved so
much in technology and internet without realizing how much we may ignore our little
children. But our children observe our actions all the time. Our children can view our reliance
on the internet, mobile phones and other gadgets. It is evident how many people are
becoming more distant because of the present technology and internet doings. Worse, our
effective and natural communication has diminished. Technology gadgets have become a
phenomenal event in the current world tide. This extremely high-tech gadget connected with
extremely wide range of social media applications has created a gap between parents and
children in terms of communication. The example of social media are Facebook, whatsapp,
line, we chat, twitter and many other fast growing social media applications. These social
Medias can be configured through androids and mobile phones. It has been trending that
everyone will be hooked on their mobiles phones for hours. Parents are not excluded of this
trending. They even set up an exemplary mode for the children. Parents are so hooked on to
modern technology to the extent that they forget their responsibilities towards their children.
They decline their obligations to their children by putting the preference to get hooked online
rather than to spend quality time mingling with their children. Parents are so attached to the
technology that they find it almost impossible to get hook off their mobile phone. For
instance, parents are so obsess with the face book application tend to spend most of the time
scrutinizing the application just to fulfill their desire of catching up with the trending issue or
technology. The consequences of this problem lead children astray. Children feel abandoned
and not well taken care of. To mount the problem, apart being left out to go to work, the
parents can still hook up to their mobile phones at the dinner table. The children might feel
totally abandoned because they demand some quality time during meal time but the time is
abused by their parents by focusing more on the mobile phone instead of focusing on the
children. Parents are actually creating a gap between themselves and the children. With more

focus on the social media and technology, parents have eventually created a huge gap among
their children. Communication is not taking place at the required amount of time. Social skill
among the children and parents are not build up which cause fragility to the family
institution. The children will grow up with unhealthy live and social habits. Children without
personal touch by their parents have the inability to emotionally attach to the human race.
Without love, care and concern, children are prone to be aggressive and show less care
towards others. They will be selfish and not open to other people. Apart from that, children
might also follow the exemplary shown by the parents. They will too get attached online with
the social media provided and probably misuse it. Computer screens, smart phones,
television, gaming devices and iPods all offer access to a virtual community through a stroke
of a key or audio command. One can create random friends world-wide by typing find
friends, on a Google search and communicate with hundreds of virtual buddies in minutes.
This could happen just because the parents are so busy getting online with their gadgets and
escape from their reality responsibility to foster their children with good values and guide
them through the use of mass media. Escaping to a technological oasis with no supervision is
not a safe environment for a child. A parent who allows a child to close the bedroom door
when the bedroom has a computer with internet access, a gaming system hooked up to the
Internet and a smart phone is the same as allowing a child to walk the streets of Tuanku
Abdul Rahman (Jalan TAR) at two in the morning. It is so unsafe for the children to explore
the stuff without adults supervision. All of the problems are related to the ignorance of
parents towards their children. How surprising it is to realize that most parents now have lost
their capability to literally connect with their children. Whenever the children do something
bad, they will put the blame on the children. With these technology and internet, children are
the ones whose ears are plugged with ear buds and eyes are fixed on the computer monitors.
But like virtually all things they do, they got trained into these habits from their parents.
Children lack of communication come from parents missing communication which is
diverted to technology and internet activities.
The other reason which contributes to the factor of modern lifestyle parents spending
little time with their children is the materialistic type of world we are living in. The in trend
parents nowadays are more attracted to the material world which really fascinate them. They
are trying to meet up to the higher living society and materials which lead them working
around the clock. Hence, the children are neglected and being left alone all the time without
attention from their parents. Parents push their hard work and effort in order to achieve the

goal to live and indulge in expensive living cost without realizing the effect it can cause to the
children. Even though parents intention is to pleasure their children with the comfort and
wealth in lifestyle, but they forget that material is not the key to happiness. By indulging the
children with piles of wealthy material, it is irreplaceable with parents love, care and
attention. Children of those parents busy working to get more income to the family does not
promise quality living lifestyle. The material does not able to bring happiness and promised
good return to the children. Despite of being left alone with less connection time together, the
children still are unhappy and reduced their quality of lifestyle. We can see through many
examples in real life significant stories which explain about how material alone could not
cater the need of our children. Children who come from wealthy family and rich background
tend to have problems either in attitude or emotional. Their personality traits are also
differing in terms how they present themselves in public. Some might look like normal
children, but as we get to know them, we can trace their problems. These children tend to
look either too shy or scared or too exposed and aggressive. Those are the effects of being left
alone too much by their parents who aim for wealth in their lifestyle. We can also watch in
the movies of how rich parents treat their children. Most of the children are actually not
feeling happy at all cost because they do not received proper amount of attention from their
parents. Their parents expectations for them are also very high nut they have nothing to give
in return as they received less attention from their parents.
In a nutshell, we can see the nature of children who demanded more love and
attention from their parents. It is significant that in this fast moving lifestyle, parents have lost
their ability to take care and nurture their children like the way our parents did before. We can
make a conclusion that either busy working parents, lacking of parental guide or modern
technology is one of the contribution factor towards spending little time with their children.
We could also say that all of the factors do contribute to the effect. Parents that are so hooked
up to modern lifestyle tend to face problem in spending quality time with their children.
Whether these parents realized or not, they are actually diverting their family and children
into an unhealthy lifestyle. It is such a lost for children who are neglected by their parents and
it is even a big lost for the parents who spend little time for their children. The children today
are our biggest investment for tomorrow. It is the biggest mistake for parents not to invest in
such a good business for a better and brighter future tomorrow.

References
K. Parker & W. Wendy (2013). Roles of Moms and Dads Converge as They Balance Work
And Family,
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/03/14/modern-parenthood-roles-of-moms-anddads-converge-as-they-balance-work-and-family/
R. Swasti (2016). Effects on Children When Both Parents are Employed.
http://www.civilserviceindia.com/subject/Essay/effects-on-children-when-bothparents-are-employed1.html
McCray, H. (2014). Grammar Dictionary. Grammar Practice Handbook.
http://www.mhschool.com/reading/treasure_workbooks/national/g4/grammar_pb.pdf

Cambridge Dictionary (2014). Cambridge Thesaurus Dictionary.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
D. Kirkova (2013). Our endless working guilt: parents confess they neglect their
Children from Monday to Friday,published 15:07 GMT, 24 April 2013
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2314074/Our-endless-working-guiltParents-confess-neglect-children-Monday-Friday.html