Bhaktivedanta VedaBase: Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 12.3.42

na rakṣiṣyanti manujāḥ

sthavirau pitarāv api

putrān bhāryāḿ ca kula-jāḿ

kṣudrāḥ śiśnodaraḿ-bharāḥ

SYNONYMS

na rakṣiṣyanti — they will not protect; manujāḥ — men; sthavirau — elderly; pitarau — parents; api — even; putrān — children; bhāryām — wife; ca — also; kula-jām — born of a proper family; kṣudrāḥ — petty; śiśna-udaram — their genitals and belly; bharāḥ — simply maintaining.

TRANSLATION

Men will no longer protect their elderly parents, their children or their respectable wives. Thoroughly degraded, they will care only to satisfy their own bellies and genitals.

PURPORT

In this age many people are already sending their elderly parents away to lonely, and often bizarre, old-age homes, although the elderly parents spent their entire lives serving their children.

Young children are also tormented in many ways in this age. Suicide among children has increased dramatically in recent years because they are being born not to loving, religious parents but to degraded, selfish men and women. In fact, children are often born because a birth-control pill, a prophylactic or some other contraceptive device malfunctioned. Under such conditions, it is very difficult nowadays for parents to morally guide their children. Generally ignorant of spiritual science, parents cannot lead their children on the path of liberation and thus fail to fulfill their primary responsibility in family life.

As predicted in this verse, adultery has become common, and people in general are extremely concerned with eating and sex, which they consider far more important than knowing the Absolute Truth.

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His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, Founder Ācārya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness
His Holiness Hrdayananda dasa Goswami
Gopiparanadhana dasa Adhikari
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