The failure of Parenting: A National Encumbrance

 

ON PARENTING AND NATION-BUILDING

The cornerstone of life is its continuity, and effectually, relative in-finiteness.

The biggest question of the day therefore is, what legacy do we plan to leave our children?

Shall we teach them to accept poverty, disease, despair, suffering, injustice, betrayal, unrighteousness, imperfection, injustice and all the other evils that have over-ran our society as an inescapable part of life to be embraced and lived with?

Shall we simply come home in the evening of this life to narrate a tale of insufficiency and mortality and incapacity to our children; our innocent pure babies that hold our thoughts, words and actions to be gospel truths?

 

This, at the end of times - at the end of every day, every month, every year, every decade and generation - is what has confronted the souls of honest men and tasked them to search their manhood for real solutions to the core-most problem of mankind since time immemorial. And this problem, in my view, may be best phrased as - man’s failure to leave a meaningful legacy to his descendants.

Now - I do admit the problem is a complicated one. And my relatively short life cannot allow me the luxury of a long lifetime to look back upon and draw wise experience from.

However, I pride myself in being a young and keen, if not critical, student of society.

And my keen social analyses have led me to believe that in attempting to tackle this problem, to begin with, we (parents, guardians, elders, teachers) must acknowledge the innocence of our children. 

And if no other factor; say ambition, humanism or anger; can spur us to make a positive, honest change in this world; then let the innocence and in-culpability of our children be the reason for our work, effort and struggle upon this earth.

These innocent souls, our children, did not write a requisition note imploring us to bring them into this world – a world which we have done so much to make cruel, unfair and unjust to them; or perhaps, for the optimists; not quite enough to make fair, just and peaceable.

They have no part in the madness that we allow to prevail and take a strangle-hold on society each day!

They have not condoned corruption, they have not waged war against brothers, and they have not held hatred in their hearts for fellow mankind;

On the contrary - they are the living, breathing representation of what is best, brightest and purest in us - as mortal men.

And as children of a God that wishes the best for his creation, and a return to the day of righteousness, glory and perfection that we have thrown away through our acceptance of evil and perpetual desire to opt for the low way – society must rediscover its parental calling.

The children of this world are not guilty! And as such, let us have no excuse in rising up and doing what is needful to safeguard their innocence; their right to inherit a society of brotherhood, love, peace and equality.

This is the meaning of parenthood; of fatherhood; of motherhood – the unrelenting, unrepentant commitment to keeping the fruit of one’s loin safe from the contamination of our fleshly indiscretion and secure from the adulteration that is rife in our debauched world!

A parent can never be justified in shifting the duty of mentor-ship, of material provision, of spiritual direction, of intellectual moulding and character formation to other elements of society – to relatives, to friends, to schools, to religious groups or ultimately to God.

Indeed, it is the Lord(s) in whom we believe that are the benefactors of loins, and who are effectively responsible for giving to us the children that we possess;

Thus, by the time we make the conscious decision of bringing these souls into the carnal world, we must be fully convinced of our desire and commitment towards doing our best in nurturing and shaping these children, ourselves! 

It is thus wrong; morally and practically, to father a child, only to expect, however remotely, other individuals or groups to – at any one point in the child’s life – step in and help you raise that child!

No - a man cannot and will not be right when he shifts his parental responsibility to society. This only means that the man is a liability to the society, and is attempting to make his child a liability to society too.

This, when done deliberately, is unacceptable!

Admitted, the greatest enemy of mankind, namely; death, may often come in to disrupt even the plans of the noblest and best-intentioned amongst us. But arguably - this is only accidental, unforeseen and often circumstantial. 

Though also, contentious as it may sound, I am hard pressed to say that many men in this world consciously invite death to themselves at a time earlier than that appointed by their gods, through selfish actions, intentionally evil habits and wrong life-choices.

Thus, only death should be the excuse for a man failing to be present for the fundamentally-full support of his offspring - but this also, not entirely.

Since; as I have pointed out earlier, even death’s adverse ramifications may be minimized, if not avoided; through firstly, righteous living which puts a man in the favor of his gods; or secondly, as a mortal precaution; foresighted holistic planning, rational decision-making and timely investment for his future generations.

Now, let it not be construed also that I am advocating for men to dis-involve concerned, willing and able members of society from contributing to the raising of their children. No.

The point I aspire to convey is this; a man should do enough for his child; within the framework of society and prevailing politico-socio-economic circumstances, so that, even without the participation of other society role-players, his child will want for nothing.

However, if circumstances are such that other men, institutions and organizations are willing to, through their own unsolicited and unrequested volition, contribute to the welfare of the child, be it intellectual, material, spiritual or otherwise, then they should be more than welcome. An extra hand is never to be declined.

Still - all this contribution, if any, should be in line with the standards set for the child by his own parent; who is solely responsible for giving direction to their child, in line with his or her convictions about life.

The parent must aspire to personally teach the child how to think, speak and act properly within the limits of their own knowledge, and where they find themselves unable, expose the child to people and organizations that may have greater means to teach this child in the way the parent appreciates to be proper.

For if the parent doesn't do so, then other social forces, inevitably, will step in to occupy this intellectual vacuum created by the parent’s un-forthcomingness with parental instruction.

Now, hoping that the arguments advanced above are sufficient to stake the claim for fatherly and motherly influences being supreme in the growth of an individual; I will proceed to do a theoretical inquest into the possible socio-economic ramifications of an inept parenting to the individual; as a function of social progress; or the lack thereof;

Let us begin with a child-centred service sector such as education.

 After the home, schools are thought, ordinarily, to be the next important training ground for the individual - in terms of imparting moral, intellectual and cultural learning - and justifiably so;

Because, with the rapidly escalating haste of this modern work-a-day world, under the strangulating influence of capitalist accumulation, it is becoming increasingly difficult for children to have more time with their parents than they do with their teachers and peers.

This has had the cumulative effect - after several years of leaving home in early mornings for school and returning home late to the company of, at the very best, domestic servants - of creating a learning deficit in the minds and souls of our children. 

This is primarily because teachers, even early childhood instructors, are not ‘supposed’ to be responsible for teaching our youngsters toilet manners or eating habits or values like sharing, attentiveness or the willingness to learn. 

Yet, because we haven’t done so as parents, this burden is shifted to the teachers unjustifiably - it being impossible for them to do their primary duty, namely; the impartation of academic knowledge onto the children, without the children’s prior acquisition of personal skills like paying attention to instruction.

  Therefore, nowadays many children are being sent to school, with the parents having cleared all financial school dues, yet without personally preparing their child to learn, minus the impartation of personal skills vital to the learning enterprise.

Inevitably, this makes it very difficult for the teacher in the school to make any meaningful inroads into the knowledge-instilling process - not after having to spend half the time meant for teaching children how to read, write and spell - in teaching them how to properly use the toilet.

The final result is that teachers either fail at both duties - producing pupils that are deficient in both academic learning and personal skills; OR they, through lack of a better option, decide to concentrate on academic instruction and hence abandon all attempts to teach the kids any personal etiquette.

This perhaps explains why the middle-class are remaining ‘progressive’ as opposed to the popular but poor masses of Africa. It is because they – the middle class - can afford to employ ‘parents’ for their children i.e. professional persons such as baby-sitters and nannies who fill the parenting gap on their behalf.

 Admittedly, if these professionals turn out to be ethical and committed individuals, then they are likely to succeed in moulding upright children. 

Though, unfortunately, this isn’t the case in many scenarios and hence even the idea of ‘’professionalizing’’ parenting often backfires; given that, in-arguably, the only meaningful parenthood can only be based on familial trust and hinged on consanguinity.

In my opinion however, an older, well-bred sibling would be the best substitute in such a case.

Poor parents on the other hand, cannot even begin to consider that option, and hence more often than not, have to personally oversee the growing defectiveness of their children as they mature.

Sadly, the consequences of this ineptitude are not short-lived, and unless luckily rectified through the child’s encounter of a worthy father-figure in a special teacher, pastor, imam or otherwise; these ills usually carry on through the child’s life. This is a counter-productive problem.

A case in point is where this toddler, scantily taught and deficient in both academic learning and social manners, or only one of them; proceeds to struggle through their primary and secondary school years as an academic mediocre simply because their foundation was a shaky one.

These children are short on empathy, on appreciation for dialogue, on tolerating differing view-points, on appreciating change and engineering creativity; simply because the best their parents have been able to bequeath unto them is domestic violence, spend-thriftiness, gossiping, back-biting, laziness and disloyalty to the vital-most of society’s values.

The terrible debauchery present in our schools therefore; in the form of strikes, truancy, pre-marital sex; ethnicity and theft, is largely attributable to the existence of the very same or closely similar evils in our ‘adult’ world i.e. marital unfaithfulness, betrayal between business partners, sibling rivalry, feuds over inheritance and family property, amongst many.

Therefore, as this treatise’s title suggests, mis-education of the next generation is one fundamental instance in which contemporary parents have let down the nation’s collective social effort to attain progress.

Moving forward, let us attempt to shine light upon another issue of concern. The matter of caring.

I would like to argue that parenting is not so much about the actual provision, but rather the care.

It is not really what you give to your child that matters, but rather the motive with which you do so.

Many of our nation’s parents, woefully, enslaved by the capitalist mode of production and ensnared in the cut-throat race for materialist accumulation, have resorted to being funders, donors and financial benefactors for their children at the expense of mentorship, inspiration and tutoring- a scenario that defeats the very objective of parenting – the preparation of a well-rounded, balanced and progressive individual for the ultimate benefit of fellow citizens.

Hence, the home, in the mind of the child, instead of being viewed as a place for seeking counsel over the many vicissitudes and dilemmas of puberty and adolescence, moral advice and emotional strengthening – becomes instead a mere stop-over for fund withdrawal or an emergency fall-back during hard economic times.

This is a vice that has majorly afflicted the so-called affluent, middle-class families of our country; where parents have traded their more sensitive roles of nurturing and grooming for the superficial duties of financial sponsorship.

So that even as they construct the most aesthetic habitation-edifices for their children and send them to the costliest schools, the children, through lack of a moral grounding, seek identity in narcotics, pornography, alcohol and other socially-degenerate habits.

  However also, this isn't to exculpate or extricate poorer parents from similar indiscretions.

They too are guilty, in their lesser means and more wretched albeit similarly materialistic struggles, of abandoning their offspring to the caprices of natural and circumstantial providence.

Thus, the fate of children raised in the slums and ghettos is even worse than their more well-heeled counterparts; not just because they won’t have access to opportunities like education and formal training, but also because they are far more morally decadent!

The point I labour to make here, is that parenting shouldn't be, unlike the increasingly populist misconception, understood to be determinable by one’s means or circumstances in life, which are often nearly unchangeable. Though a sound argument may be made too, for the fact that one is responsible for their present-state in the first place, through prior conscious life-choices.

That not-withstanding - no matter one’s physical circumstances, our people should be made to understand that successful parenting is possible. 

As long as parents care more for their society, they will naturally begin to appreciate the critical need for all-round investment in their children, society’s posterity, as their single greatest contribution to this world.

This investment should be moral, material and intellectual; teaching the child not only to look out for themselves, but always to take into account the effect their thoughts, words and actions have upon other men.

This type of teaching should be started early enough, when the child is mouldable - and sustained through the life of the child for as long as it takes for them to learn the lessons therein unforgettably - with the over-all objective of ensuring that the child thinks of nothing else as important in their life, short of bettering society through collaborative effort with other men.