You cannot separate the behaviour of a child from the image of his home or parents they are interwoven.
“Once upon a time, parents had a lot of children, but today, children have a lot of parents.”- Obafemi Awolowo
While it is true that the era in which we live presently is responsible for the domestic anomalies that daily confront us, it must also be asserted that we have a major role to play in ensuring that things go as we intend them to. We can decide the trends that occur in our lives and make arrangements towards achieving our set goals and objectives. We are not totally left at the mercy of fate for the progression of our lives. We owe much of the successes we achieve to our personal efforts and not to chance. If we want to be successful in life, then we must decide to be. Life is absolutely what we make of it.
Let's take a quick tour into the rising trend of Domestic Anomalies and the role it has played in marring the character of our spontaneously pristine children. As children are leaders of tomorrow, it is very pertinent to address all issues that affect them, while ensuring that they get the best kind of life obtainable.
Parents are the closest to their children, therefore, the influence they exert on their children cannot be over-emphasized. Apart from being the progenitors and source of their children, parents are the primary caretakers of their kids. They are saddled with the responsibility of raising their kids into responsible members of the society. At the end, the children become a reflection of their parents. They copy and take after their parents in all regards. Children copy a lot as they use their visual senses very effectively. They reproduce whatever gestures they are exposed to, without asking if the gestures are right, wrong, kind, fair or proper - they just reserve the moral rights to imitate and emulate whatever gestures they are shown by the parents and caretakers.
It must be noted that the children who are born in this era have shown considerable differences and disparities from those who were born in the era before now. All or most of the disparities that exist between these two generations of children are as a result of the trends that have risen in this generation that never existed in the previous era. As civilization has taken the place of our home-spun customs and traditions, we now have a breed of civilized kids who have become immersed in the Western Culture rather than the African lifestyle that characterized the previous era. Today, the internet has altered the status and face of our world. In this jet/computer age, children are more interested in exotic and outlandish lifestyles than in keeping up with the sacred norms and milieux that characterized the era of their parents.
Funny enough, they are not to blame as they have little or no say over these trends that have come to overwhelm them. The trends seem to have also beclouded the instinct of the parents who should expressly set original paces for their children to follow. How would you blame a child for acting wrongly when his parents had never taught him the differences between right and wrong? By natural instinct, individual perception of right and wrong is relative because an individual only comes to appreciate the knowledge that he is exposed to. If he is taught that right is wrong and wrong is right, then he imbibes that doctrine and programmes his mind to think and act in that wise.
The family is the background of any individual, and it is the most important unit of any society. If a child's background is faulty, then it is expected that the child will introduce into the society the products of his faulty pedigree, but if he is given a sound upbringing, he invariably infuses virtues into his environment. That said, it now behooves the parents to inculcate virtues, high moral standards and discipline in their children. As parents are morally bound to raise their kids properly, it becomes necessary for them to do well always to set good examples for their children. Most times when children err, parents don't correct them. This sends a wrong signal to the child who erred. He is emboldened to perpetrate worse crimes in the future. Often times when children behave, they reflect their parents and families. You cannot separate the behaviour of a child from the image of his home or parents - they are interwoven. A child simply bears the identity and insignia of his parents and home.
Now, as concerned people who want to change the negative outlook of our society, we would sternly caution that parents eschew from setting bad examples for their children to copy. There are families where forgiveness or pardon is considered a taboo, you would therefore not expect a child from such a home to forgive the wrongs done to him. Then, there are homes where hospitality is considered a vital part of life. The children from the above mentioned homes would reflect their family values when they behave. It must be noted that inculcating values in children must commence from the cradle. A child only learns and imbibes the values taught him at childhood. When he has grown beyond the formative years, it becomes difficult to bend him towards any doctrine or culture. For instance, children who are taught to pray on waking up in the morning do not miss their morning prayers because they have come to adopt praying as a habit and are thus stable in that regard. But try to teach a child to maintain good personal hygiene when he is 15 and see if he will find it easy to adopt. A child is taught to take care of his body and surrounding when he is still very young and tender. Often times we hear adults talk about the values and norms they were taught at childhood which have shaped their perception of life. That is how critical it is to begin early enough to teach a child - he will never depart from the lessons taught him during his formative years. Even the Bible admonishes us to “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when is grown, he will not depart from it.” It is now incumbent on the adults who are saddled with the responsibility of raising these children to inculcate the right values and morals in them. Children are pristinely innocent. They are forged through the lessons, doctrines, values and morals they are taught. You can imagine the generation of adults we would have in our world if all children were taught to take up positive lifestyles. Sadly enough, there are children who are taught out-rightly to constitute nuisance to the society in which they live. A boy once confessed to the fact that his mother exposed him to sexual immorality by allowing him watch her have sex with assorted men. He grew up to believe that sexual promiscuity was a proper lifestyle. Another child claimed that his father often obliged him to sip from his glass of beer. He thus grew up to become a chronic drunk. A girl attributed her hatred for the opposite sex to the fact that her dad often molested her mum before her eyes. She thus grew up perceiving all men to be monstrously violent like her dad. These and many more are instances of what our innocent children are daily exposed to.
This is therefore a wakeup call to all parents and caretakers of children to do their parenting duties excellently. As a parent, how often have you thought about the kind of adult you would want your child to grow into? It is very disappointing that some parents do not even have time to spare out for their kids. They spend all their time pursuing after their set goals and objectives and abandon their precious children to nobody. The result is that the children take up the habits and norms they are exposed to by their environment. They imbibe all manner of doctrines that regularly accost them. Some children have come to see their parents as near-strangers because they often miss the presence of the parents who are supposed to be closest to them. A woman once complained bitterly about the sudden change in attitude that her children displayed towards her, and when the kids were called in for a close interview, they revealed that they were not being given attention and love by their parents who were always away from home. That is the vicious circle that is formed with the rising trend of parents' nonchalance towards the affairs of their children.
One pathetic incident that often makes me go lachrymose each time I remember it was that of six children who were all burnt to death by (methane) gas fire. The children had returned from school and tried to fix some launch for themselves. The eldest child went into the kitchen and turned on the gas cylinder. He delayed a bit before lighting up the burner, and because the gas had diffused into the air in the kitchen, an explosion occurred as soon as he lit the burner. The house went ablaze and all the children were trapped. There were no neighbours around to come to their rescue. This ugly incident wouldn't have occurred if there had been an adult in the house on that fateful day to prepare lunch for those children. So many avoidable ugly incidents of this nature have also occurred because parents neglected their divinely-assigned duties.
Karl Marx, one of the greatest philosophers who wrote many of the books and theories that inspired rebellion and violence in the hearts of his students, was said to have suffered a terrible childhood. He was exposed to violence early in life and thus grew up to perceive life as a strictly competitive battlefield where only the fittest survived. He was said not to have even the slightest iota of tenderness or care in his heart. He viewed everyone as his opponent against whom he had to compete. If he had experienced love and care during his formative years, he wouldn't have written the kind of inciting books that inspired and instigated Adolph Hitler to foment the Second World War. Instances abound of remarkable personalities who made negative history because of the kind of bitter childhood experiences they underwent.
Michael Jackson, the late King of Pop Music and multi-billionaire, once confessed to having been deprived of normal childhood because his dad wanted him to grow into the greatest musician ever. He eventually attained the feat but not without losing a precious childhood that no level of fame could make up for. The result was that at his adulthood, he indulged in frivolous acts that were considered very childish and terribly awkward. He said he did the nasty things he did because he needed to give vent to his childhood fantasies and experience the wonderful childhood he was never allowed to enjoy. He was accused severally of molesting young boys and dragged to court on a number of occasions on account of assault and sexual harassment. This is a typical example of what an adult can suffer if he is not allowed to enjoy a sound upbringing.
Finally, let me put it to parents that each and every one of us must give account of how we raised the children that were given to us by God. It is thought-provoking how parents bring children into this world and not raise them up in the proper and best way they should. While there are numerous couples who are yearning for children to call their own, there are yet a great number of couples who have a surplus of offspring and cannot do as little as commit time and resources to bringing them up the right way. This is indeed an irony of life. If I were the Almighty, I would only give children to those who will take proper care of them. Children are a precious gift from God, and all parents who have been so richly blessed with these special gifts should consider them as such. Life is very sacred. It should be preserved, and the best way to preserve life is to see to the welfare of children who are the helpless ones and the most prone to danger. Children are very vulnerable and gullible because of their naivety and ingenuousness. Their weakness should not be exploited by adults. Adults should ask themselves if children would be fair to them were the tables to be turned and a switch of roles occurs. I am sure that our children would not treat us nicely if they were to be the adults and we are in their shoes. If we do good to our children, we inadvertently do good to ourselves, and as Angel Seedorf puts it “No man ever tries to do genuine good to another man without inadvertently doing good to himself.” Keep pondering over this until we meet in the next edition.
Hasta La Vista!
No comments:
Post a Comment