Onwuasoanya FCC Jones, an opinion and issues contributor to USAfricaonline.com, first African-owned, US-based professional newspaper published on the Internet and USAfrica magazine, Houston.
We are in a period when it is easier to keep a child from taking a few more scoops of the beverage than keeping them away from harmful sites on the internet. Many children learn to press q phone’s keypads before they learn to mutter their first audible words like; Papa, Mama, or such short words. You know what? We pride ourselves in the fact that our children are good with the phone. It is of course, commendable, if our children show early signs that they could become the next Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and any of the big boys and girls of the Silicon Valley, but we must understand that these individuals and all the big heads of today’s technology driven world did not learn their skills from social media. Exposing your child to the beneficial skills of IT and coding is different from allowing them unsupervised access to the social media.
I didn’t have any toys growing up, but I know that the toys which my peers had access to in our time as toddlers, were deliberately made to type, to suit the age that could use them. If you go to a toy shop today, you will see different toys designated for certain age groups. This is because the makers understand that like the human body, the brain also grows one step at a time. There are things that a certain age group might be able to deal with that another age group would find difficult to appreciate, and when we impose it on them, we might end up giving them an injury they might never come over in their entire lifetime.
Today, electronic gadgets like iPads, phones and others have replaced the toys we were used to, growing up. This is a good thing, because we cannot ignore the enormous benefits of early exposure to technology for our kids. But the danger is in uncontrolled usage. How much attention do we pay to know what kind of sites our kids visit? Do we know what they watch, when they hide in their rooms? Do we even care to monitor or even control the time they spend on screen?
Today’s parents are damn too busy to care. Those who are not very busy are now too conscious about not hurting their children. We overindulge them, just because we want to make them happy. We fail to understand that the greatest hurt we can meet to them is failing to help them build useful and healthy habits. I was listening to a radio programme one day and the anchor said something that hasn’t left my consciousness. I will paraphrase it like this; “Building resilience in our children is very important. It is important to strive to make our children happy, to give everything we can afford in order to make their lives comfortable, but it is also important to be deliberate in teaching them that life can be tough, and they need that toughness to be able to survive.
Marriages are breaking down more rapidly today than when we were growing up. We now have more serial killers than lunatics on our streets, people are being driven by queer fantasies and we now consider many unnatural inclinations as normal. We are already feeling that the world is going apart but if care is not taken, what we have today will be a child’s play to the situation of our society in the next decade.
The West whom we are trying to copy from are making more concerted efforts to control the dangerous influences of these new technologies, especially, the social media. Rules are being drafted and proclaimed in order to protect our children and safeguard our future from the noxious impacts of social media and other technologies. But, Third World countries like ours would be more interested in copying than refining, and before we know it, the people we copied from have put in place, strong safety measures while we are left to bear the brunt of what we merely copied.
For instance, the US Surgeon-general, Vivek Murphy has been at the forefront of campaigns to completely keep children under the age of 13 off social media and to regulate its usage for those under 18. He feels that the social media is so harmful that its owners should be placed under the same strict advertising guideline as cigarette manufacturers, by compelling them to put a label on their products warning about its harms to children’s mental and as well as adults.
As much as possible, be responsible in parenting your children. Within the limits of your resources and circumstances, invest your best. Even when you are not understood, or you have a partner who doesn’t support or understand, the most important thing is to exhaust your capacities. Throw all of them in for the sake of those beautiful gifts and God will definitely understand even if no one does.
May we invest the right kind of efforts to raise children who will be healthier and better than us. Amen.
