Parents in our frightening new world

By Falilat Adetoun Olaoye –

It was 34 years ago during my national service that I first encountered what I didn’t realise then was an incipient malaise. A secondary school class 3 student was stalking one of our flat mates. Dude was handsome and taught her class one of the core courses. We thought it was juvenile infatuation and that she would outgrow it.

The girl was probably 15; but already a real seductress. For a couple of months, it was a cat and mouse game between the awkward two.

Friends and flat mates observed discreetly as dude dodged, hid and ran from the teen! He had the self-control and common sense to sustain the resistance, I had assumed. Until I learnt later that he had fallen!

Those were days before the internet and social media came to take control of our lives.

Now we are faced with a social epidemic of enormous proportions.

Everything under the sun is available on the net and can be accesssed with small data. Drugs, attention, fame, no matter how damaging, and oh yes, sex, a variety of it. Pornography is at the fingertips, or at the press of a button and it is consuming our children.

Questionable characters in entertainment and so-called influencers have become their role models. Pictures and videos of half-clad or totally nude young women are posted on social media to trend and attract traffic. Hugh! And the “contents” are unending, with new innovations arriving daily and the next person bent on outdoing the last.

And yes, the old are in the game too. Dignitaries openly patronize aphrodisiacs and sex toys shops. Married people are on dating sites, sharing nude videos with friends their children’s mates.

Hardly a month goes by now without the appearance of a leaked video of a so-called celebrity. My ‘old school’ mind tells me many of these things are connected to drug abuse but I may be wrong.

We have all heard about Mohbad. The name has been trending globally for weeks on the internet. His story of abuse by the people around him is tragic and the authorities still have to get to the roots.

However, without the drugs and cultism, which he picked from bad association, his trajectory might have been different. It breaks my heart as a mother to think that with some attention, he could have been pulled out of the morass that consumed him and eventually truncated his life.

In the perilous new world of this generation where the norm is to conform, only the grace of God keeps children sane. The world, real or virtual, pulls them hard even when parents build around them moral protection.

Drugs, cultism, and sex have no class or gender. From the lowliest to the mightiest societies, vices bring people together. School children, artisans, professionals and politicians are all involved.

And they defy age too.

Three months ago, I was part of a meeting on business investments. We realised that guest houses and hotels now top investments in our cities and towns. A particular middle class estate valued for its serenity now has about 303 hotels and guest houses, many of them deliberately obscure with no signboards.

Even residential buildings are being converted to brothels because they offer better returns on investment. The patrons stroll in without shame because “aiye n se rue”. It’s trendy to do so.

Among those providing”service” at the facilities are secondary school students, some of them kitted in school uniforms with the skirts worn loose and the blouses zipped open to bare their breasts.

Among their patrons are dignitaries who drive them away in flashy cars. Our children have lost their innocence and our society is now a moral wasteland!

And the consequences are all around us.
Every day, we see scary headlines of heart-rending stories of gruesome murder and fetish killings. Boys murder their girlfriends so they can ‘’blow.’’ Girls are drugged, killed and mutilated by their patrons. A boy killed his father and harvested his organs for money rituals. Teenagers gang-rape neighbours’ children. The stories are endless. All of them connected by drugs and money!

Some time ago, a young female doctor was nabbed for peddling cake laced with drugs on the internet. In another video that trended recently, a group of girls was rounded up at a party after a fight broke out. Found on the girls were weeds packaged in Milo sachets. Each faced the camera and told her story with big smiles. Weed had robbed them of shame.

It would now seem that the lord spirituals mount the pulpits in vain. Bloggers who haven’t managed their own lives are the new priests of the internet, giving the world direction. They draw better attention than priests are given at worship centres. The pastor preaches unity in families, the bloggers spread the gospel of division, their own alternative truth. Many marriages are on the brink because of these ones.

Their followers spread their messages. Videos spread that depict wives as Jezebel and men as Lucifer. No one seems to notice that the family structure is being assailed.

Do parents even have the power to nurture their children?

Correcting a misdemeanor is now termed as judgmental. Do not judge! And so we keep mum and watch promising children turn to Yahoo yahoo, drugs and cultism, or lining the streets at night or hooking up in real time on the internet. In some parts it is either banditry or terrorism. Kidnapping for ransom has become a national shame.

‘You don’t know their story,’ is a popular refrain.

The story was told of a 16-year-old girl who told her older sister she was looking to date a yahoo boy.

Another girl recently declared that she sleeps with dogs for a fee.

Yet another graduated recently from a tertiary school and made a video thanking God and her pu.sy!

But it’s not just about the adolescent.

Illicit liaisons between married neighbours appear now to be tolerated. Married co-workers fight over married male colleagues. Some would swear that the same is happening in worship centres, and between teachers and their students.

Motivational speakers say we should live the way they want; one person’s happiness should not depend on another’s.

And so well-behaved youths are now the butt of jokes. It is no longer trendy to be God-fearing. Children are losing their souls and parents are helpless.

But you cannot give what you do not have. We have seen young couples giving their toddlers Shisha and liquor – to make them belong early enough.

Like the preacher who has a duty of redirecting lost sheep, parents must not wait for their wards to fall in the pit just to allow them to make their own mistakes. Parents must reprimand bad behavior.

The family system is failing. Each of us must now do what we can to recreate the version of the world that we love.

Parents must return to the old ways of raising children. It should still take a village to raise a child. Neighbours and teachers should be able to correct children with assurance of the parent’ s support. There is nothing we can do about the internet; it has come to stay. But we can give more attention to our children rather than worldly things.

We must be firm rather than pamper, we must pay close attention to what our adolescent children engage in, who their friends are, what they bring home, what they put on.

We can raise them to know that strangers should not dictate their lives. That not all that glitters is gold. That the race is not always to the swift. That to be calm and cool headed is not bad. To be respectful is not old school. That God’s way is still the best way.

*Mrs Olaoye writes from Ilorin, Kwara State.