Should adult children be forced to maintain their parents, no matter what?
Senator and former mayor of Montego Bay Charles Sinclair Jr is making himself known for more than being the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) son of a famous former People’s National Party (PNP) mayor, and for succeeding the JLP son of another former PNP mayor, the late Mr Cecil Donaldson, Sr.
Mr Sinclair who, it can be assumed, had a decent relationship with his late father, Mr Charles Sinclair Sr, has been championing the enforcement of the Maintenance Act, under which adult children can be legally forced to maintain their abandoned parents and/or grandparents.
For good or for bad, children don’t get to choose their biological parents, and it’s a bit more than obvious that many would quickly pick someone else to be their father or mother, if they had the choice.
The story of Jamaica is littered with men and women, but mostly men, who can often be seen roaming the streets, living in State-run infirmaries, or abandoned in public hospitals because their children either can’t or are unwilling to shoulder the responsibility for their welfare.
One of the popular narratives is that the men in their youth abandon their own children and when they fall upon hard times in their old age, their angry and bitter offspring want nothing to do with them.
But Deputy Senate President Charles Sinclair wants them held accountable for the care and protection of the parents, including “those they have allowed to live on the streets and to depend on the benevolence of others, including the State, to care for them, especially in cases where these children are in a position to assist in the resuscitation”.
He took special note of the estimated 200 people, called social patients, who had been discharged in 2021, but were still staying at hospitals after relatives failed to pick them up, some abandoned for several years, at a cost of almost $408.6 million annually to the Government covering nurses, doctors, social workers, nursing assistants, medication, accommodation, meals, toiletries, and personal care.
“Some persons who end up here [at the infirmary], their family who are out there, able-bodied with… the capacity to improve themselves, because they have the energy, [have] turned their backs on their relatives who end up staying in this facility,” Mr Sinclair told a ceremony to open a new male ward at the St James Infirmary last week.
The Health and Wellness Minister Dr Christopher Tufton disclosed that his ministry had sought the advice of the attorney general to determine how best to approach the problem of social patients, specifically to hold relatives responsible.
The business of holding children responsible for maintaining parents is never going to be an uncomplicated one. The Government’s concept is one of having the entire country share the burden.
It will, however, be difficult to move some people from a position of don’t-care to one of caring for parents who either abandoned them, abused them, or in any other way failed to lay a solid foundation for their future well-being.
We expect that it is one of those matters that legislation will never be able to resolve, and will, at the best of times, be very hard to enforce. Moral suasion seems to be the more appropriate approach.