Children's Upbringing In Today's Modern Society (Parenting Now In Crisis): (An Ar-se-nal for Mass Construction and Repairs of Diverse Issues in Human Life Today)

By Fr. Greg. Udo Njoku CSSp

Writing has marked Fr. Greg Udo Njoku, CSSp’s life from his infant classes. He always thrilled his schoolmates in the morning assembly with recitals of little sonnets, dirges, poems, and epic rhymes.

For his secondary school, he attended the renowned Kings College in Lagos, Nigeria, a model school founded by British colonizers in 1909 and named after King’s College in Oxford, London, comparable to Harvard University in America (see book 12).

Father Greg’s habit for writing is, for him, a therapeutic as well as a spiritual exercise. Writing or reading from his books solaces him greatly and feeds his whole being with joy, strength, peace, hope, and calmness that he is unable to grasp. In reading his writings, he becomes energized and recharged.

Gifted with a powerful, creative imagination, much of Father Greg’s writings go with divine inspirations. His book series serves as a panacea for diverse forms of addictions, ill dispositions that could land their victims in rehabs, juvenile justice courts, counseling centers, depression, violent behaviors, jail terms, suicide, and murder. As a hardy Catholic missionary priest for the past thirty-nine years, his writings have been strong references in his pastoral and educational tasks.

Father Greg thanks God for the use he has made of his books wherever he has worked.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662439803

Book preview

Chapter 1

Children’s Upbringing in Today’s Modern World and Society

Parenting Now in Crisis

The parenting enterprise today is in a full-blown crisis. Many parents, neglecting the ideal and proper way of rearing children, only step in when there is a crisis in the lives of their children; and their parenting approach by then is but mere firefighting! Before the 1960s, parenting was almost a full-time engagement for most mothers along with various domestic chores, gardening, and perhaps petty trading that can be accommodated by a housewife and mother. Men were often referred to as breadwinners as if women were less busy because they were at home.

Today in most families, both husbands and wives work outside the home, often in far-distant locations. With their good salaries, couples can always pay for their house maintenance, pay for their children’s education, and supply all their material needs even more than they dare ask for. Research and experience, however, show that there can be no substitute for the time that parents need to spend interacting and relating with their children. The material goods offered to children cannot take the place of the affection, instructions, dialogue, pastime, and family meals that parents should share with their children.

As Hillary Clinton (1996) rightly said, Parenthood has the power to redefine every aspect of life: marriage, work, even relationships with family and friends.³ This is very true of African society. In the African family, the moment the first child arrives into the marriage of a couple, the child’s welfare henceforth dictates the life in the family. In that culture, parents live for their children, and the children live for their family and harbor their parents in their old age and care for them.

Children’s experience in their family during their growing years is very crucial for their future. Families shape our lives. Our early family experiences greatly influence and, to some degree, determine how we forever after think and behave.

Rules and Regulations in the Training of Children

Children need consistency and a bit of firmness in the rules of their training; otherwise, they would be quick to discover the loopholes and exploit them. The guiding principle from the onset should be the old Latin dictum Aut optimum, aut nihil, meaning It is either the best or nothing. The problem of our age is that many parents today pamper their children too much from the onset. By the time the child is posing a real problem in the family, parents then try to withdraw any of the unnecessary and senseless privileges that they had smothered the child with earlier. The child would equally try to defend these as his or her birthrights and interpret their belated withdrawal as hatred, injustice, and abuse and would therefore fight back (with his gang group perhaps as has happened in some cases.)

When parents allow mere infants and children to have the last word concerning the nature of their birthday program, birthday gifts, or gifts to their friends, their ruin has certainly begun. When children are allowed to decide what weekend activities they must attend, their feeding habits or menu, clothes and shoes to wear, the times they go to sleep at night, how long they remain at play even at other people’s houses, and a whole world of choices by which parents can so carelessly destroy the tender will of growing children, in this way they perhaps unknowingly encourage these children to be disrespectful, unruly, proud, disloyal to authorities, be manipulative, and dishonest.

When people today argue that children and teens should be left to make their own choices in life, that they have the right to choose what to and what not to do, my question is On what would they base their decisions and their choices when they have known no moral principles and no good social values to base their evaluations? This new ideology and cheap trend that encourages parents to relate to their children as peers and pals and let them have their way even from infancy is indeed a criminal idea. All these sweet talks have ruined many of our children, our society, and the world today. How can parents, with their divinely constituted authority and commission, give up the mandate of rearing their children rightly on the shameful pretext of rights and freedom of children? No wonder that many in our world and society are showing very little maturity today in human behavior and relationship. My first book called The Rights of Children and the Duties of Parents has been so named to show that children, in reality, have only the rights of being well reared up by parents. They are not to be left uncultivated and so constitute a nuisance to society and a failure in their own eyes.

I watched a certain grandmother once boasting hilariously before a group of her friends, I spoil my grandkids. We are best of friends especially in their childhood. Now, my questions on the above proud infatuation and narcissistic indulgence are Why only in their childhood days and not also in their adolescence and adulthood? What will be their stories and living conditions by the ‘evenings of their lives’? How authentic is that boasting when my background check later reveals that this same grandmother has a grandson in jail on a murder charge? Her two granddaughters ended their college careers abruptly by becoming teenage mothers at ages fifteen and sixteen respectively. The remaining grandson, now living with her, is a drug addict and an alcoholic plagued with constant depression and suicidal inclinations. What then is there to boast about in such a family? Yet this grandmother herself is from a dysfunctional family where her ex-husband had walked out on her, leaving her with six young children to look after and with no worthwhile resources to live on. She probably has a lot to answer for in the whole story. Overpampering and poor upbringing of children have the answers!

Mere Interventions Will Not Do

Many working mothers and fathers today have, in a way, abandoned the fundamental role of parenting and merely step in to intervene when there is a crisis in the children’s lives and the family. As far as the whole business of rearing children is concerned, nature has so ordered it that there is no short-circuiting, no jumpstarting. Parents who have used these shortcuts are already paying dearly for them.

It is in vain that some quick-fix-mentality parents have come to believe they have found a shortcut by just giving birth to a baby and seeing him or her very briefly each morning before rushing off to work and doing the same on coming home at night while the nanny or babysitter does the rest. Then from their school-age, the day-care, and after-school programs can engage the child through each passing day while parents go about their own world of cares and worries, hardly interacting with their children. They do this from day to day and, for weeks and months, save casual greetings, questions, and moments of giving the children things they asked for. This, however, will hardly guarantee morally well-behaved children and mentally healthy characters. Merely meeting up with the financial education and other material and social needs of the child will not do. At the way things are going, some people may soon start "raising children online," whatever that would be like.

The child can still grow up to be a seemingly attractive young adult but also a well-primed time bomb and an adult baby indeed. In the psychosocial stages of development of the human organism, the higher you go, the hotter it becomes. The complexity of the human personality increases with age, and each stage of development needs to be reclaimed and cultivated in the child-rearing program.

Humans are rule-following creatures, but ours today is a law-evading system. How long will this continue? To rear up children without morals is to rear a bunch of nuisance into the society, said Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president of the United States (1901–1909). That we live in a technological age does not justify all the confusion and violence in our world today. As Dr. Benjamin Spock rightly predicted several years ago:

No matter how far we grasp the nature and workings of the atom, of bacteria, and the outer space without a fair advancement of morality, our co-relative advancement in wickedness, in greed, and materialism in this age will drive us to use our scientific discoveries to destroy ourselves. In