Home FEATURES The Ambivalence Of Nigerian Children, Youths

The Ambivalence Of Nigerian Children, Youths

School children

We in Greenbarge Reporters join in celebrating the children day today. This is because, like many others, we believe that children and youths are the future of the society.

Even religions acknowledge the importance of children: while for example, the Holy Bible commands Christians to go into the world and multiply…the Holy Qur’an also enjoined Muslims to procreate even as the Holy Prophet of Islam, Prophet Muhammad asked Muslims to procreate as many as possible so that he would be proud of his Ummah (people) on the day of judgment.

Our fore-parents might not be so religious, but they not only procreated, but asserted certain discipline and control over their children so much that such children grew up with a sense of responsibility, respect for the elders and constituted authorities and so on.

However, either the technological advancement or the exigencies of the changing times seem to have turned the children and youths into masters of sort. Children and youths no longer hold the values which our fore parents so much cherished because they are not taught.

What do you expect when, for example, a child, of opulent parents, is pampered from the very day he is born? This is a child that is taken to school in an air conditioned car, given junk foods, such as cake, chocolate, Mr. Biggs frozen chicken, fish pie, etc.; made to be untouchable by his teachers and when he returns home, he is asked to go for siesta after which he goes to the living room to watch cartoon programmes from where his lesson teacher would pet him to take a short lesson. And at the other extreme is a child in far distant poverty ridden village that is constantly over-burdened with farm work in hunger. He is never given an opportunity or the parents are so poor that they cannot afford to enroll him in school.

The two children in the two extreme environments are likely to grow up as masters in two different circumstances: the wealthy one looks at life as all roses while the other one looks at life with disdain. Often what happens is that a child is influenced more by a peer group than by their parents because most times, either the parents are too busy to attend to their moral upbringing, in the case of the children in the city and even in the village.

Of course, the child right initiative enunciated and promoted by the United Nations Education Funds (UNICEF) is meant to fight for the rights of the child, especially, of the one in the extreme poverty ridden society, but it has not taken into consideration the present trend where parents and even the society ignorantly abandoned their primary responsibility of moulding a complete human being in the child and instead, moulding some kind of monster, through what they see as LOVE and CARE.

As a matter of fact, there is no way parents who have a lot of money to throw around would be prevented from showing “love” to their children, by pampering and spoiling them, however, there is urgent need for total re-orientation of the way children are being brought up. There is urgent need to return to the ways of our parents where children are made to undergo some kind of ‘hardships,’ doing domestic chores instead of engaging house help, being punished for wrong doing, being made to eat pure African food such as amala, pounded yam, tuwo, akpu and so on. There is the urgent need to return to the disciplinarian life where the children are taught the proper African manners and mannerism.

All these are meant to remind us that, yes; UNICEF may have points in insisting that children should be treated like ‘eggs,’ but that our ways in Africa are far different. One single culture being floated across the world on the way to handle children would definitely favour some countries and disfavor or even destroy the moral fabrics of others.

This is to say, in effect that, each society should be allowed to grow according to the quality of the behavioural pattern of the children. For, if the children in a particular society are, by the societal standards, lazy, disrespectful, uncultured in all senses, the future of such society breeding such children would definitely be in jeopardy. Nigerian children and youths, therefore, should be treated with the peculiarity of the Nigerian socio-cultural systems so that Nigeria would begin to flourish in all other aspects of human endeavor. [myad]

 

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