We are commenting on this board and what you write here is highly uninformed bias.

The point I make is that there is no need to talk of respect when there is love, and where there is no love, you will generally find that the son or daughter has not had the happiest of upbringings and that it is now payback time.

And however unpleasant that sounds, it is entirely normal psychology and it is not for the state to interfere.

I know, personally, people my age who were abandoned – completely – by one or both of their parents, whose parents were selfish and neglectful drunks, who dumped them in boarding-school to get them out of the way and didn’t even bother with them during the holidays, who abandoned their own children to the point where they left the country entirely and left their children behind, who were addicted to heroin or other drugs and incapable of looking after their children at all – and you speak of respect?

What respect can their be in these circumstances? The damage is horrendous. These are the subjects that should be discussed.

It means going to that person’s funeral or wake. So yes, I would say it is your duty to do that.

You are unable to distinguish between moral duty and obligation at law.

What you are talking about is moral duty.

What Justyne Caruana is talking about is obligation at law.

People have no obligation at law to clean their parents’ houses or look after them. The government plans to make this an obligation at law with a penalty of forfeiture of inheritance in violation of the parent’s express wishes as specified in his or her last will and testament.

We are obliged at law to look after our children and provide for them financially and in other ways until they reach 18. After that, we have no such obligation at law. If we wish to carry on providing for our children in part or whole, it is up to us.

Similarly, it is up to us to decide whether we look after our parents or not, and not up to the government to force us to do so.

You need to learn some history – specifically, about how the concept of the welfare state grew out of the need to alleviate the terrible problems of a social system in which elderly people who could no longer work were thrown on the mercy of their children, also becoming a burden to them.

In that situation, many people had children simply to have insurance for their old age.

You also need to understand that attitudes towards children and childhood were not always what they are today, and that the shift happened relatively recently.

Even within living memory, people routinely had children because that is what one did. Their relationship with their children was utilitarian and you can’t blame those children for reciprocating in kind.

All talk of respect is misplaced. You respect the law and authority but you LOVE your parents. Or you don’t.

If you love your parents you make sure they’re all right, and if you don’t love them, you don’t care either way and I think you’ll find that – in the absence of a drink or drugs problem – it’s generally their fault.

They’re still going on about is-serq f’Tas-Sliema and il-prezz tad-dawl, so I’ve lost all hope on that score.

It is illegal now, which is why they plan to legislate to make it legal.

Children are no more responsible for their parents than parents are responsible for their children who are over 18.

That is why there are state pensions and social services.

If children take care of their parents it is entirely voluntary and because they are able to do so.

When you have your own home, marriage, children and family life, you have to put those – and not your aged parents – first. Decent parents understand this completely, but then decent parents make provision for their own care and don’t assume that they can dump themselves on their children.

Old people are not children. They are you and me, a generation or two older. Unless you have dementia or are bed-ridden, there really is no excuse for ending up in a state of helpless dependency.

Lots of Maltese old people become dependent through their own will. It’s as though they have waited all their lives for the moment when they can become a ruddy nuisance to others, blaming their old age for their inability to do things that old people the world over appear to have no problem doing at all.

But there are not enough beds in state homes so we are being threatened that if we ‘abandon ‘our parents we cannot “access the will” (whatever than means).

I think that borders on the illegal.

The people dumped on state care generally have nothing but their state pension and no estate to inherit. That’s Justyne Caruana’s conundrum.

The government’s real problem – and this is what it stems from – is that it needs places for hundreds of old people in residential care but cannot see how to organise it or pay for it.

Yet it is the government’s obligation to do so.

People do not remain financially dependent on their parents until they are 30. I have never known even one person who did that.

You seem not to understand that the whole point of the welfare state – at least, one of its essential aims – was to avoid having old people become dependent on their grown children, or to have grown children burdened – financially and otherwise – with the care of their elderly and incapacitated parents at a time when they have so many other problems to be getting on with.