Parenthood And Quirky Children

By Azore Opio

Have you ever wondered what young people would do, if they had no elders to shock? And what elders would talk about, if they had no children to shock them – the schoolboy smoking a cigarette clumsily in the school toilet or openly in the street. The indifference, that youthful offhandedness with which gangs of youths wear their pantaloons below their buttocks to show off their underwear, a young girl finding it divine to wear artificial eyelashes, tight-fitting mini-skirts to show off her nubile thighs and bulging behind? It is more than probable that these youngsters do all these less for their own pleasure than to transfix the older class. And to belong.

Nowadays, children grow up in the anecdotal cult of ephemeral divinities. They tend to know more about stars than they do about their parents. Very often, now, stars provide the pasture on which children graze. The walls of their rooms are splattered with coloured photos of these starry fellows. And now, the Internet will be the death of many. The Internet is the modern supersonic supermarket where pornography and homosexuality are sold and new members are recruited into drug and crime syndicates.

Our children, like all other children who have grown on this earth, have been lured to their doom by fashion, advertisement and movies made to present violence, blood and death as the in-things. The youths have been led to trade traditional values, sensible life principles such as truth, morality and integrity, for fast wealth, bogus success and immediate self-gratification – winning at all cost. They want instant success. And want it now! For this, we can but only thank the parents and the media.

Parents these days do not seem to have much impact on their children; they take the easy way out and let the youngsters grow like weed. They prefer to hang out late into the night, knocking out more than one bottle too many and having little quality time with their kids. When we throw in seductive TV and other media programmes, we have a bunch of misled children and their parents who believe that success is the possession of material wealth; that success, or is it happiness? is rooted in outward looks; the glittering things we purchase and flaunt, living for show.

Parents will have to take a new hard look at the mythical standard of success spread by the media like cancer and take even a harder decision at what success is all about and on which direction to point to their kids to find real happiness.