A year ago I met a family that had come settled down in Kerala after returning from Muscat. I was so enamored by their decision that I made it a point to spend a day with them.

The mother of two teenage children told me why they returned from the Persian Gulf. “We want to spend more time with our children and enjoy their presence. Their childhood will never come back,” said the woman, who son is in the twelfth grade and daughter in sixth.

She said she was engrossed in her career as a nurse until now. “Of course I was serving people with joy. But now I want to comb and tie the hair of my daughter. I want to be close to my children as they are grow up.”

She has a reason for her longing to be with her children. “I had been away from my mother and siblings since I was in hostels for studies. Now I want to be close to them, especially my mother,” she added.

As she spoke her husband, Ajit K George, sat near her smiling.

He said many of his friends were shocked at his decision to quit and return to his native place. “My promotion was imminent with double salary.” Looking at his wife he continued, “She is a prayerful person. And I trust her insights and inspirations and we decide together. And things are going on well.”

His comments reminded me what Pope Francis said in Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love). “Loving another person involves the joy of contemplating and appreciating their innate beauty and sacredness, which is greater than my needs. For the love by which one person is pleasing to another depends on his or her giving something freely. (AL 129)

But the Kerala couple had to plan much before taking that bold step. The man had aged parents and a widowed sister whose daughter requires his attention.

“We decided to build a house at first. And then my wife would stay with our two children for a year. This would help us know the living standards here. But then my mother fell ill. While I continued to work, she looked after my mother here. It was challenging as she had the two children with her,” he said looking at the wife with pride and joy.

The wife was quick to chip in. “He also had to secure an amount for niece’s future including her marriage. When all what we had planned had been put in place, he too left his job and now we are here,” she said embracing the two children seated on either side of her.

They are among the happiest families I have met. Their house surrounded by the coconut and nutmeg trees, on the bank of a river quietly flowing all the time, in fact is the perfect place for them to enjoy the quietness from the hurried lives they left behind in Muscat.

They were parents who wanted to have a happy family and quality time with children. “Children are a gift. Each one is unique and irreplaceable. We love our children, not because they are beautiful, or look or think as we do, or embody our dreams. We love them because they are children. A child is a child of God,” (AL 170) the words of Pope Francis resounded in my heart as I watched the two children helping out the mother in the kitchen.

This couple was an unlike modern parents who gift their children expensive gadgets, mobile phones, MP3 players, televisions, designer label clothes rather than spend any quality time with them.

Pope Francis: “Every child has a right to receive love from a mother and a father; both are necessary for a child’s integral and harmonious development.”

Once an elderly sick person I met told me, “Yes, my children visit me regularly. They have no time to talk as such. All of them including the grandchildren have mobile phones. They sit around me but they are on their mobile phones all the time.”

I have also heard that family members communicate through mobile phone from different rooms of the same house.

Some families ‘co-exist’ under the same roof, rather than share space and time together, with children in their media world, surrounded by sound and communicating through the internet.

What Pope Francis is telling us in ‘Amoris Laetitia’ (post synodal exhortation) is that families need to spend quality time with each other, to learn to give each other their love, and their undivided attention.

Perhaps at least one meal in the day could be taken together, without the background interference of radio or television.

We need each other’s presence; we need to meet heart to heart. Healthy relationships within the home are the bedrock of any society. Relationships of mutual sharing, experiencing and responding are vital to healthy growth.

In this regard AL 66 notes: “The covenant of love and fidelity lived by the Holy Family of Nazareth illuminates the principle which gives shape to every family, and enables it better to face the vicissitudes of life and history. On this basis, every family, despite its weaknesses, can become a light in the darkness of the world. ‘Nazareth teaches us the meaning of family life, its loving communion, its simple and austere beauty, its sacred and inviolable character. May it tech how sweet and irreplaceable is its training, how fundamental and incomparable it s role in the social order.”

Recently I met a young woman with two little boys. Talking with her I learned that her husband was in the US, and she had promised him that she would join him when he got settled there with the job. “No I told him I shall stay here,” she said.

I looked at her with wide eyes.

“Yes, my children are my bank balance. I do not want anything else. And my needs are very limited. I want my children to be safe and have value based lives. Money will come and go,” she said matter of fact.

I congratulated her with all my heart.

Six months later when she met me with her husband who had come to spend time with the children who were on holidays, I enquired, “How long will you be here?”

“I may not go back,” he said. “They are not interested to come there. They are important to me.”

I was delighted.

The world will go on with a few people of this kind who are willing to sacrifice luxury for quality time with their family.

The strength of the family lies in its capacity to love and to teach how to love,” (AL 53) the Pope reminds us.

Once the children reach their youth they will leave the comfortable nest of their home and security of their parents in view of a broader horizon of their career or vocation in life.

Blessed are the parents who realize this early in life.

We recall here the words of the pope in AL 38: “We must be grateful that most people do value family relationships that are permanent and marked by mutual respect.”