FIRING LINE: Bring the ‘second parents’ back

FIRING LINE: Bring the ‘second parents’ back

By Robert B. Roque Jr | August 25, 2026

In 2012, the Department of Education (DepEd) issued Order No. 40, the Child Protection Policy, to ensure schoolchildren were shielded from abuse.

But in spite of the good intention, many teachers of today will tell you that policy has quietly done something else. It seems to have stripped them of the everyday authority to discipline, correct, and mold the very children entrusted to their care.

A reprimand, a phone confiscated, a student asked to stand at the end of the room for disrupting class have ceased to be ordinary acts of classroom management and are now treated and complained — sometimes even prosecuted — as “psychological abuse.”

Teachers are now enveloped in a climate of fear of backlash from parents, so many of them stopped intervening in children’s bad behavior in class altogether. The Teachers’ Dignity Coalition noted that this reality has developed not out of indifference, but self-preservation.

Sadly, though, this is not what the Convention on the Rights of the Child ever intended for us. When the United Nations drafted the UNCRC in 1989, it was answering crises in the West — institutional and domestic abuse hidden behind parental sovereignty — and in Africa, where war and famine turned children into soldiers and casualties.

In our part of the world, the pressing wounds were poverty, child labor, and trafficking, not a deficit of discipline at home or in the classroom. Filipino children, for all our hardships, were shaped by a culture that still called teachers “second parents.” This was unique in the world but also a real social contract.

It was not a term of endearment borne out of sentimentality but a cultural high regard for teachers that was built in the way Filipino kids were raised in homes, groomed in churches, spoken to by elders, and practiced in classrooms.

Through the UNCRC, however, we imported a framework meant to solve a different problem, and in doing so, we may have eroded something distinctly ours: the trust that let a teacher discipline 40, even 60, children in a class all on her and as her own. With guidance counselors scarce and classrooms overcrowded, teachers are now asked to be tutor, counselor, and peacekeeper at once — without protection.

That is why proposals like the Student Discipline and Teacher Protection Act deserve serious attention. Nobody is asking to bring back corporal punishment; that door should stay shut. But a good-faith clause, legal assistance, and confidentiality during investigations would let teachers act like the second parents Filipino families once trusted them to be — without fear that doing their job will cost them their career.

We did not need the West to teach us how to raise disciplined, resilient children. We only need to trust our own culture again.

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