Mother’s Day in Thailand

First I would like to wish Her Majesty the Queen a happy birthday! As she is regarded as a mother to all Thais, we also celebrate 12th August as National Mother’s Day. At school yesterday, the students took part in a special ceremony to honour Her Majesty. But, also to pay homage to their own mothers. representative mothers for each class were presented with jasmine garlands by their children. Then the special Mother’s Day songs were sung. It was all very emotional and there was hardly a dry eye amongst the people present.

After witnessing this public display of emotion, I was surprised to see the following poll published in The Nation newspaper this morning. It seemed to suggest that relationships with mothers had fallen in the last few years. I am not sure how true that is from what I have seen with my own eyes.

Quality of mother-child relations has dropped: poll

Bangkok women have become laxer in their attitudes to discipline over the past three generations, and their children admit feeling uneasy about having to say “Thank you” and “Sorry” to their mothers and grandmothers, a poll revealed yesterday.

The poll, conducted last Monday to Wednesday, also detected fissures in the mother-child relationship, with children seeing less and less of their mothers on a daily basis. Many of 1,245 respondents, grandmothers, mothers and children aged 12 to 24, said they wanted to say sorry to their mothers, mostly for making rude and abusive remarks to them, Abac Poll’s Noppadol Kannika told a press conference yesterday.

One-third of the children aged between 12 and 15 said they felt uneasy about having to say “Thank you” and “Sorry” to their mothers in front of others, as did 20.6 per cent of those aged between 16 and 19 and 27.3 per cent of those aged between 20 and 24 years, Noppadol said.

Those who had met and spoken to their mothers on a daily basis in the past three months went down from last year’s survey’s 63.6 per cent to 46.4 per cent, while those who had not went up from last year’s 8.1 per cent to 23.7 per cent, Noppadol said.

Over half of those polled said they had never exercised with their mothers, 46.1 per cent had never taken their mothers to movies, and 31.2 per cent had never travelled with their mothers.