When it comes to parents and their kids, there will always be enough blame to go around. We can say that the kids are people of their own who have their own minds and as such should own up to the decisions that they made. Yeah, I know that blaming the past for your present actions is a backward thing to do and as a people, we all have to do better. However, I feel that you just can’t help it. There are some things you’ll witness and you’ll realize that it’s all the parent's fault that the kids turn out that way.
This is not true for every bad kid. There are kids who are simply doomed to be bad eggs, it was as if right from their inception they were marked to be trouble. Sadly, nothing would have changed regardless of what their parents did. No matter the lessons taught and no matter all the punishments given to them, na wetin dey their mind na im them go later do.
Sadly, parents of this generation especially can be very relaxed when it comes to their kids. When you observe many of them with their kids, you wonder if they’re scared of scolding them. They would rather pick fights with strangers and even friends than tell their kids to do the right thing.
This happened last week; on my way from school after my exams for the day, I stopped at a shop to get a chilled drink. The shop owner had a little boy that was playing out in front. He wasn’t even up to six yet, but his idea of playing was standing and peeing into the road. However, he was always waiting for when someone would walk across. Then, when they jumped away, trying to avoid the pee, he would burst into laughter. Yeah, this was his idea of a play.
When I noticed it, I was furious. I called the mother’s attention to what her boy was doing but she pretended she wasn’t hearing me, just as she pretended that she wasn’t seeing what he was doing. I considered pushing it, but we all know how some parents can be when they think that you’re criticizing their parenting skills. Well, the boy soon peed on someone who was distracted and couldn’t get out of the way in time. It led to the boy being spanked by the person. Just a slap and it sent the boy crying to the mother.
That was when the lioness in the woman awoke! She began to berate the person, demanding to know why they would dare to hit her child. She screamed that “he was just a boy” and “he didn’t know what he was doing”. Yeah, that was her excuse!
When she saw that he was doing something bad, she refused to correct him, she pretended to ignore him. Yet, when the consequence of his action caught up with him, she tried to fight it. The person didn’t even have her time, he told her that if she did too much, she would also get a taste of what her son got. The entire debacle just pissed me off, I ended up leaving without buying anything.
We can say that the guy was wrong in hitting the kid, but I think if a child knowingly pees on me and then laughs in my face about it, there are not a lot of options to how the encounter is going to go down. Parents like this woman are the ones who enable their kids. They let them get away with everything during their “adorable stage” and when they grow older, these attributes no longer seem cute because they’re no longer babies and people will start getting really mad. But by then, it would be too late.
In such scenarios, the parent will always be to blame. But in other scenarios, it could just be that despite the parents doing everything that they could, the child could easily fall in with the wrong crowd. You could raise a child right for 18 years, and groom them into absolute angels. And then, once they get into the university, all that is needed is for them to have the wrong kind of roommate, or coursemate. All that would be required to destroy 18 years' worth of teaching and discipline can be just one person. That’s how bad it can be.
So, I guess it’s all subjective. Every family’s story is different. We’d never really know why the chicken crossed the road, in the same way, we’d never really know why some people turn out the way they do. It could be the fault of their parents, the fault of the society, or even the friends that they keep. Sadly, society, parents, and friends are the ones that suffer for their actions. Not the perpetrators. That’s just the tragedy of life.
