Family plays important roles in the development of children and their future.
Family responsibilities to children do not end with provision of basic needs of shelter, food and clothing. Children look up to parents to define and orientate them on values and boundaries of life and the consequences if one crosses boundaries. When parents fail to provide these needed guiding principles, such children will be left to fend for themselves and could easily become victims of negative peer group influence and other agents of socialization.
According to the recent State of Children Report by UNICEF, more than one hundred and sixty million children are infected daily with deadly diseases, including HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. This is an indictment of families on their inability to live up to their responsibilities because some of the infections and deaths could be prevented through simple immunization, careful nursing as well as proper and balanced dieting.
Failure of parents to provide moral compass for families has resulted in the present decadence challenging the society. Irresponsible lifestyle by parents is not only destroying the image and integrity of the family but equally labelling the children with negative identity likely to mar their future.
Again, many parents give their underage children access to smartphones, tablets, personal computers, video games and other high-tech gadgets with which they explore many sites without restriction or control. Much of the content children are exposed to on the internet are not only harmful but detrimental to their wellbeing because very dangerous materials are always lurking in various dark parts of cyberspace.
Positive parenting requires nurturing, support, and guidance to help children develop into confident and independent individuals, while bad parenting can lead children to struggle with emotional and behavioural issues, have trouble forming healthy relationships, and may have difficulty succeeding in school and in the future.
Again, children with poor or negative parenting often suffer relationship crises not only as children but also as adults and at old age.
People of poor parenting are sometimes a source of disunity, rancour and acrimony in organizations and associations they belong to and hardly respect constituted authority because they lack ethical and social values that guide relationships in the larger society.
Because of fear of unknown, negative self-perception and feeling of inadequacy, people of poor parenting background often fall back to substance abuse including addiction to alcohol and other intoxicants which further erode their sense of reasoning and tilt them more towards negative lifestyle of greed, fraud, immorality, exploitative tendencies and avarice.
Parenting is an ongoing process and often challenging which requires patience, honesty and hard work. There is a need for parents to be positive role models to their children because children often learn more from what their parents do than what they say. There is equally a need to enforce strict discipline when necessary but without anger or resentment.
It is important to stress that showing love and affection to a child should not be encouraging him or her to toe a path of self-destruction and disrupt the child’s opportunity to attain full potential through hard work, dedication and perseverance.
