Every year the church from her inception maps out about 40 days to prepare her children for a proper observance of the Lord’s suffering, death and resurrection.  This is the church’s Lenten season.  It is the time of the year when we intensify our prayer, penance and help to others.  In observing the discipline of lent, it is pertinent that we make it holy by certain degree of self-abnegation and mortification.  As parents, let us use this year’s Lenten observance to reflect on how the remissness of our primary duty in the home has affected negatively the behaviour of our children/youths in the society.

To the best of my knowledge the origin of juvenile crime could be traced to the home/family.  In the society today, there is high level of broken homes manifested in divorce, separation, spousal cold war, unwholesome dissertation of the home by either of the spouses, sexual promiscuity, and its concomitant illegitimacy.  The mandatory godly injunction to parents/guardians to “Train up a child while he is young, when he grows up, he will not depart from it” (Prov 22:6) has been grossly flouted and indeed treated with blame-worthy levity by most of us parents.  The direct upshot of this ignominious parental recalcitrance is the unbridled rate of juvenile crimes in the society.

Today, juvenile crimes in our society are legion and among others include: kidnapping, armed robbery, cultism, rape, Boko “Haramism”, prostitution, examination malpractice and the like.  These crimes are perpetrated by youths between 20 and 25 years of age.  Youths who, under normal circumstances, should be kept under strict parental surveillance.  The youths responsible for these antisocial and peace-eroding activities in the society are the children of some of us parents, who rashly abdicated their God-given roles in the home.

What a child should be in life is prepared for him in the home by his parents and this is done during his impressionable age.  From the home a child is given to appreciate the moral and spiritual values of life; the ability to understand and respect the rights of other people; the need to regard and respect constituted authority and the joy of expressing love for others.  If we parents, who should at home be teaching excathedra abinitio, execute our primary duties judiciously and at the nick of time (tender age), these juvenile crimes in the society will be minimal, if not completely checked.  That these youth have incorrigibly blossomed out of parental-cum-societal control with no sense of moral values, no respect for constituted authority and more seriously, no sense of security and regard for life and properties of others is a graphic evidence of the remissness in our primary duty of training a child from infancy.

The most serious cause of juvenile crime or child’s delinquency is lack of proper monitoring of the child’s all-round development and character in the home by his parents.  These days we have little or no time to watch in the home the gradual mental, psychological and physiological growth of our children.  Most of us do not even think it is our primary duty at home to play our didactic and directional roles towards our children.  To most of us, it is enough care given to our children if we send them to school, feed and clothe them.  Hence, ignorantly, some of us shift the onus of this very critical and heavy responsibility to our babysitters, mates or maids who are usually not spiritually and morally competent enough to substitute for us and whose authority over our children is unfortunately limited by nature.  This unhealthy abdication of our primordial duty as parents is nemesically dangerous.

In the past, training  a child used to be collectively synergic.  One common adage then and even now says ‘if you see a fowl using its legs to scatter faeces, chase it away because nobody knows who will eat its legs’.  This adage corroborates the collectiveness in the training of a child in the days of yore.  It was in retrospect very unthinkable to see a child curse his/her parents or guardian, let alone throw a stone at or beat him/her and was allowed by neighbors or relations to go scot free.  Such a child was taught the lesson of his life that day and even the case reported to the school when indeed school was school for more corrective measures.   It is disheartening that in our present society such a filial anomalous exhibition has become a spectacle worthy of commendation by some spectators.  The reason for this is not far fetched; some parents pugnaciously confront any person trying to correct their stubborn and heady child even under the nose of the erring child, thus encouraging in him more impetus and spirit of recalcitrance.

Dear parents, since a pigheaded child cannot be collectively disciplined by us, the teachers in the school, relations and neighbors around us as it was done in the past, how can we expect sanity in the society?  Such expectation is no doubt hallucinatory.  This abysmal failure of us parents to discipline a child for indecent and inhuman behavior and to teach him decorous morality in the home indeed contributes majorly to juvenile crime in the society.  It is in the home that children are taught ethical standard by their parents through parental exemplary behavior and precepts.  Children can be taught biblical morality where a family prays and reads the bible together.  Or they can unwittingly learn immorality from what plays out around them at home especially via watching uncensored film/movies which most often are borrowed and played when we are out hunting for naira.  In fact all the values of a child are developed in the home, either his natal home or his neighbors or friends home.

I still strongly feel that most of us parents should own a relatively large chunk of the blame for the juvenile crimes in the society.  In addition to some of us not giving them the real teaching we owe them at home by our exemplary life, most of us unwittingly teach and encourage them to engage in immoral and unethical behavior in the society by what we do before them.  A parent is a parent no matter where you are and a child is a child anywhere he is – in the market place in your business area, in the farm, in your workshop, in your office, in the church, at home – you remain a parent and he remains a child.  On this premise therefore, we should sincerely play the role of parents we are to any child at all who we have responsibility and the privilege to correct, train, teach, direct or help in any way.

The youths are blamed for almost all the evils in the society today.  Is there any how or way we parents have hands in what they do or connive at or encourage them in what they are doing?  Take this citation as one in a thousand: as a catechist, a man brought a report to me against his children and asked me to call and admonish them.  I reasoned we do it eyeball to eyeball with them to which he obliged.  During the meeting, this man fumed and raked over his children’s behavior with authority as the father, deprecating every act of their immoral life under his nose.  His children’s reaction gave me Goosebumps and rendered me wordless.  When the first son got up, I taught he was going to defend his innocence, but far from it.  Rather he said “Sir KBC, all my father said about me is true, but ask him where I learnt these things he said I do.  My father has two women friends in this village to whom he sends a basket of cassava and a head of plantain each every four market day.  As I was not balanced to hear more of the man’s seemingly “covered” movement in the village due to charged atmosphere, I ended the meeting unceremoniously.  From this story you can see that our children learn from the seat of their pants.

We always blame our children for examination malpractice in schools and colleges, forgetting that it takes two to tango.  Who is responsible for leakage of examination question papers in schools and colleges, the children or the parents entrusted with custody of exam question papers?  Who are the supervisors of all the external examinations in schools and colleges the children or the parents?  Who collects money from the school children during these exams and after connive at their exam fraud?  In buying question papers and even engaging mercenaries to write those exams for them, who sells the question papers and who sponsors these students?  In our institutions of higher learning, who demands for sorting in kind or in cash from the students?  Who demands money or adhoc submission of self from a job seeker before employment is offered him/her?

From another perspective, who encourages or sponsors a girl to abort an “unwanted” child in the name of saving ones face in the church?  Who mobilizes the youth to foment political rumpus, destroy lives, properties and thus provoke insecurity in the society during political campaigns and election?  Most parents who mobilize these pig-ignorant and wooden-headed youths to engage in acts capable of turning the society topsy turvy hide their biological children within or outside the town or state and without scruples project the untutored children of the rank and file parents.

To be Contd

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