Parents and guardians need to invest more in teaching children ‘How to live’

Globally, most parents and guardians have prioritised for their children, above other things, the possibility of securing a better and more comfortable future.

These parents and guardians, where everything is normal, also do their best to help their children become better people, which is the pride and joy of all good parents and guardians.

Nonetheless, with the younger parents, particularly the generation referred to as millennials, there is generally a marked difference due to the massive and rapid change in the circumstances of life globally. It is a matter of concern because the population of millennial parents is considerably higher, and the number of children born to them is high as well.

It would be a false and misleading denial to assume that global socioeconomic and cultural trends do not affect parenting. Of course, they do, and to a great extent, permanently!

Is there a possibility of excluding completely, for example, the social media life from young parents today, or doing away completely with the cultural and lifestyle influence brought about by the ease of internationality and interculturality engineered by social media? Obviously, No! We cannot even think of these things, as they have many advantages for everyone and the common good.

However, evident in the mannerism of children born to millennial parents, most prioritise success, growth, fame, and having all that they need hic-et-nunc (here and now).

They are young people who are desperate and often entitled to the things they want as their rights. While these manners can be excused as a stage of growth into independent personhood, looked at from a keener perspective, they are dangerous.

Life is beyond making a living. Making a living is a crucial need for sustenance and the only assured way of sustaining oneself without being a bother or a nuisance to others, to family, or government. Yet it is one side of the coin.

Excelling in making a living can earn one all the honours, titles, and privileges that the world has to offer for those who can afford it. However, all that can go down the drain and lose value in the eyes and hearts of people if one does not know how to live with people.

In Kiswahili, the admonition ‘Ishi na watu vizuri’ is commonplace, and it indeed says more all the time a wise person hears it. Most young people do not get this right, as they grow up in homes that operate by democracy, where parents seek their consent and comfortability for everything, where they have access to every piece of information: assuming to know it all, and where boundaries are thinner between parents or guardians and their children.

A child who has never been scolded or put right by the parents can hardly survive the competition out there, where there are serious people who do not entertain jokes and laxity.

Children who can freely and democratically argue with their parents can hardly listen and obey the teachers or other adults who are busy doing their duties out there and won’t tolerate ‘nonsense’.

Once humility and discipline are not built from home, there are chances of one missing those values forever, unless a painful miraculous lesson surfaces later on in life.

Millennial parents need to reconsider that giving clear direction as parents is not being dictatorial; it is simply giving direction. Responsiveness can still flourish even in keeping to directions.

The turn of things is evident when these children, raised in these new ways, face problems in life. They easily drop into critical crises because they have not experienced the pressure or lack for those in rich families. As such, every problem is a big problem.

Many children lack proper social bonding and place less value on enduring relationships because of the normalcy of online life, save for those whose living conditions have been limited by a lack of facilities.

If a child grows up valuing sufficiency over friendship, they do not change all of a sudden when they grow. There are higher chances of them finding it difficult to establish strong relationships.

In developed economies, it is even worse, as most young people do not find any interest in marriage or childbearing. They rather want to ‘enjoy their life.’ Their outlook on life is to make a living (money) and to enjoy life.

As the influence of the global culture spreads constantly with a ripple effect, in third-world countries we are not left behind. While this is not advocacy for some kind of extraordinarily strange parenting, it is an advocacy of reasonable parenting where the parents discern and lead, not themselves being inattentive and just following what makes children happy at that moment.

Children need to learn the culture and its richness as much as possible because in the culture there is traditional wisdom which generations of people have used to live better lives. Forming a generation that lacks or, even worse, defies culture is creating a timebomb for the generations to come. Religion, too, provides brilliant direction on how to live.

One of the best ways to achieve this is by engaging children with older generations. Old is gold! Old is not odd! Wisdom is not confined to certain times! Children should be taught to accept the wisdom of older people with humility and joy, even if those older grandparents do not know modern things like computers, the internet, etc.

Wisdom, just like wine, gets better with age. The big thing is to train them from when they are young that, first, they do not know everything, and secondly, not everything can be learnt or proved from the internet and social media.

Shimbo Pastory is an advocate for positive social transformation. He writes from Manila, the Philippines. Email: [email protected]; WhatsApp: +639951661979.