Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor met reporters before attending the Executive Council on Tuesday (11th), announcing that all kindergartens and primary schools in the school will be able to suspend face-to-face classes and all school activities on or before January 14th until the end of the Lunar New Year holiday, but at the same time she also emphasized that hope Classes can continue.
Later, she explained that due to the strong self-care ability of middle school students, middle school classrooms are not affected by the above policy, and face-to-face classes can continue.
Once a young child is diagnosed or a school outbreak occurs, it is impossible for the children involved to be sent to quarantine measures independently, and their parents will definitely need to face isolation together to take care of them.
Therefore, the current suspension of face-to-face classes in kindergartens and primary schools is a way to cut off the source of the problem and effectively reduce the chance of young children contracting the virus.
Working families still face challenges
However, considering that there is still a lot of room for improvement in Hong Kong's current working family-friendly policies, stopping face-to-face classes may at best be the lesser of two evils.
According to a survey conducted by the DAB on the mental health of dual-career families in 2019, it was found that nearly 60% of the respondents believed that they had difficulty fulfilling their family responsibilities and suffered from mental distress to varying degrees, and 5.3% of the respondents said that I have experienced emotional instability and a potential suicide risk, which shows that dual-career families in Hong Kong are indeed facing a lot of pressure, and these are only the levels before the outbreak of the epidemic.
Moreover, after the forced cessation of face-to-face classes, the young children who stay at home still have to be taken care of by adults. If the relevant family does not employ domestic helpers or there are no other adults in the family to take care of them, these pressures will fall directly on the parents, and even cause They were forced to temporarily give up their jobs.
The new situation of the epidemic can be an opportunity for a new policy
Dual-career families are becoming more commonplace in Hong Kong. Although the government implemented a five-day statutory paternity leave for men in January 2019, it extended the statutory maternity leave from 10 weeks to 14 weeks in December 2020, which is paid by employers. However, apart from the above support during the expected period of childbirth, it seems that the government has not been motivated to implement more family-friendly policies. Given the current situation, Hong Kong should provide more support during childcare.
The epidemic has brought a lot of difficulties to the society, but it has also created a new normal that may be beneficial to the society. It is more obvious that more companies choose to allow employees to maintain the operation of the company through the "work from home" model.
At the same time, this move is actually giving families with children more room to take care of them.
If the government can encourage enterprises to continue to operate in this way, in disguise, it will increase support for working families during childcare, which will help promote Hong Kong to become a truly family-friendly society in the long run, and remove various obstacles to childcare for citizens, thereby creating fertility. Incentives to slow down the trend of aging and low birthrate.
Has the authorities made any progress from the suspension of primary and secondary schools until the Lunar New Year one year has passed?
Vaccination builds a social protection net, and epidemic prevention can be tightened before it can be loosened
