This generation of parents!

Many bizarre things are happening these days. Nigerians are going through a terrible time; perhaps, inflows from the Western world. Many Nigerian parents are no longer role models to their children. In their crave to make huge wealth, they have abdicated their roles to teachers in school and domestic staff.

Nowadays, maids run the homes and children are under the control of these surrogate “parents” who themselves need mentoring. The collapse of morals in society is the creation of a generation of parents that sees nothing wrong with immoral dressing; disrespect for elders; and total disregard for the culture of salutation and humility. In their bid to copy western lifestyle wholesale, they have thrown the society into a mess.

In the days when parents were real parents, child training was not exclusive preserve of the immediate family. Everybody contributed to training a child. How? A stranger sees a child doing something bad; that stranger sharply scolds or even sometimes spanks the child and threatens to tell the parents. And the child becomes sober and repentant immediately.

The parent is told later of the stupid behaviour of the child and the parent thanks the neighbour profusely for the intervention. Today, scold another person’s child, the parent will tell you to mind your business.

A Nigerian actress was quoted recently as saying: “If any teacher as much as touches my son, they will meet the devil face to face. Leave the disciplining to parents. Educating them is your own responsibility. Give them an inch and they will take a mile.” With this type of bragging and threat, a child from that home could go off handle, doing whatever he or she likes in school, knowing that the parents would always stand by him or her.

In the days gone by, it was normal to see a neighbour hitting the child of another caught in petty stealing, without first telling the parents and when the report got to the parents, they too would give the child thorough beating. This communal effort at impacting discipline was cherished and the child so disciplined never had the temerity to abuse the neighbour that disciplined him or her.

In those days, parents would go to the school where their children attend to crosscheck their performance and instruct the teachers never to spare the rod on their children. In many instances, parents witnessed the flogging of their own children by teachers. Sometimes, heady students were so flogged that when they got home they wouldn’t be able to sit with their buttocks or if the flogging was on their hands, the hands would be swollen to the point that their mothers would be applying hot water and other soothing balms on the wounds or swellings. And the parents commended the teachers. But what do we have today? It is a generation of parents that goes to war with teachers for disciplining their children. Stories abound of parents who marched to their children’s schools, armed with canes and when they got there they ordered their children to flog the particular teacher that had earlier disciplined them. This bestial display is now rampant among parents who are in the force.

BDSUNDAY was told of a recent incident where a woman, whose son attends a Force school, drove to the school with the orderly of her late husband who was a high ranking officer. She ordered the son to show her the teacher that flogged him. She then handed a long whip to the son to give the teacher the number of lashes he (the teacher) had flogged the boy. The boy did as the mother directed him, in the full glare of other school teachers and students.

There have been instances where female teachers were molested by their school boys at the instance of their parents.

The Nigerian society is full of obscene sights all over the place; married women and men displaying nakedness with reckless abandon.

Mothers bare their breasts on the streets; they bare their back side and move about in skimpy dresses accompanied by their children. They neither fear God nor man. They still display in holy places. When they go to Church, they occupy front rows of the pews with heavy chest popping into the face of the officiating minister as if they were offering themselves as sacrifice to the minister. If you try to match their age with their desperate display, there’s no correlation. They try to outdo their daughters in everything despicable.

Sometimes, it appears that some of them put themselves under oath to pull down their pastor. They pay unnecessary and unsuspecting visits to their Bishops in terrible outfits; yet, they are Christian mothers and sometimes the financial pillars of that Church.

But days were when it was almost a sacrilege for a married woman and mother to as much as dress in such a way that advertise her pubic hair (in fact, it was unheard of). But today a good number of mothers have thrown morality to the dog.

They go to the market and buy spaghetti dresses for their female daughters; they buy body hugs and all manner of wears that are suggestive. They encourage these children to bare it all, all in the name of civilisation and fashion, but when these children are raped and molested on account of the wears bought by Mummy and daddy, the parents begin to disturb the peace of the Nigeria Police.

A generation of parents that share boyfriends and girlfriends with their children. A mother arranges boyfriends for their daughters; daughters “sub let” their boyfriends to their mothers; some fathers fighting with their sons over girlfriends. A generation of parents that meet in club and drinking parlours with their children. It is a liberal world. A generation of parents that brag and boast to their children that they will eliminate this and that person because of disagreement over business transactions. A generation of parents that steal church money; government money and company’s money and brag about it to their children. A generation of parents that bribe their way to the top and ensure their children get whatever their eyes desire no matter how useless and senseless such desires may be. A generation of parents that have turned worship centres into fashion arena. Burial ceremonies are now carnivals to satisfy their crave for partying.

Today’s generation of parents encourage their children to involve in examination fraud. They register the children in special centres knowing full well what goes on there; they provide the money for their lazy children who do not take reading their books seriously to “sort things out” with their lecturers. The parents know that such terms refer to buying of marks; compromising lecturers to obtain pass grades, etc. Some parents nowadays are known to encourage their female children to use what they have to get what they want. It is a generation of parents that believe that the end justifies the means.

Some parents these days withdraw their children from one school and put them in another simply because the school insists on sticking to the principle of credibility and integrity, and has nothing to do with examination fraud that is the order of the day in many private schools across the country.

From the womb, many today’s parents teach their children all manner of crimes. They make questionable phone calls in front of their children, they tell lies with reckless abandon to the point that their stupefied children say to them “Ah Daddy, Ah Mummy is that really true?” They are in Oshodi telling a caller they are in Mile 2 area of Lagos State. Some lie that they are in Abuja when indeed they are in Lagos even before their young children.

Someone writing on ‘This is the worst generation of parents ever’, said: “My theory is that liberalism is to blame. Parents won’t tell their kid to shut up because they have this pussyfooting modern view of how telling their kids off means they don’t love them. Somehow, loving your child has turned into letting it do whatever it wants because telling it ‘NO’ would be a crime against love. It’s the soft approach that is ruining children today. Every time I have encountered or heard about problematic youngsters in my area, their background was always the same. They came from a broken home where their parents were too busy arguing, drinking, gambling, or doing drugs to care about what their child was doing. Many statistics will show that broken homes turn children to crime.

“A strict home is not a militant one. The older generation reminds us of how they used to get a belt to the butt if they did something wrong and how it did them no harm. In most cases they’re right. They turned into well-mannered, respectful citizens.

“People who are against hitting children see no compromise in the issue. You can’t touch them, period. If you do, they should take your kids away. It’s gone beyond that, though. As a stranger, you can’t even tell a noisy child to quiet down. Should you be sitting on public transportation and see a child yelling in anger with its mother sitting there looking exhausted, you wouldn’t dare say anything. When we’re allowed to get away with things, we exploit that freedom. It’s a basic human instinct. We knew it when we were kids and we know it now. If you’re taught from an early age that you won’t be able to manipulate, then you stop doing it.”

“It’s time for modern-day parents to understand that a little discipline doesn’t hurt. Not only that, your kid will thank you for it later in life and probably turn out to be a pretty decent human being.”

Today, for many parents spoiling children is mistaken for loving them. A child is granted unrestricted access to the internet and he/she is free to browse anything. It is part of love and exposure. Parents never say ‘NO’ to any of their requests. They have no time to go to bed at night. In fact, they are allowed to watch all kinds of movies with their parents no matter the contents.