The Root Cause of Social Ills Amongst Youth is …
gopimenon June 27th, 2010
Recently there has been a lot of news reports about horrific problems with schoolchildren, teenagers and youth in general. Some of the problems include `extreme ragging’ causing death of new students, ‘bullying’, ‘teenage pregnancies’ and even ‘molest and rape’ at the school compound!
Such things were unheard of in our time, just a couple of decades ago! What has gone wrong? As always people complain about the teachers, discipline masters, and headmasters of schools. They also point fingers at the police. But nobody seems to talk about the root cause of all these problems – Poor Parenting! If good parenting were still in vogue, then we would not need to have such pleas to leave our children alone as shown in this street art.
- Image via Wikipedia
Parents nowadays are too busy with their careers to spend enough time with their children inculcating GOOD VALUES! They feel that they are doing their part by providing the children with food and money for their education and expect the teachers at school to teach them good values! They forget that the persons with the most influence on their children are themselves, or they are too busy to take the trouble!
It does take time, it takes patience and it is a little trouble to teach your children good values - such as considerateness for others, courtesy, keeping their word and other aspects of good character. But it is not impossible if you make it a priority.
Of course children are a priority; a well brought up child grows up to be a stable, caring, matured adult who is an asset to society, the country and the world! But a badly brought up child is a burden on society both socially and economically!
The biggest lesson of all that a parent should teach a child is to feel empathy for another! This one quality alone will overcome almost all the bad behavior that we encounter among youth. If we teach them from the time they are toddlers that they have to feel what another feels; that their actions should not hurt another; then we are over the greatest hurdle!
So we teach them to share their toys and not just grab another’s toy. We ask them how they themselves would feel if somebody snatched their toy. Children are very malleable – they learn whatever their parents (or any trusted caregiver) teach, either by their words or actions. Children also learn by example! So if you forbid them from smoking while you chain-smoke, then they are NOT going to listen to you.
If a boy has been taught from young to respect girls, then he would grow up respectful of girls and women when he is a teenager. If, instead, all he sees is callous behavior towards women by the men in his life or even in movies and TV shows, then that is what he learns! It is worse if such behavior is endorsed by so-called religious male chauvinists. The boy grows up thinking it is okay to mistreat women and feels no compunction at all for his discourteous acts towards women!
Talking about empathy, I am appalled at the way some parents treat their maids and thus teach their children it is okay to treat people who work for them as lesser humans (who can be treated as slaves). These parents should take to heart the statement “There but for the grace of God, go I”!
These employers are blessed to be in the fortunate position they are in and should be grateful for their own good fortune and sympathize with the lot of the maids. They should realize that if things were otherwise, it could be they or their children who may have to do menial work! Then how would they feel? That is empathy – to feel what others feel if they were in the others shoes.
So it all starts from the home – a happy family with caring parents who know how to balance discipline with love, will always raise happy, stable kids who will grow up to be a joy and a blessing to the world! Let not parents pass over this huge responsibility of raising kids with good values, to the school teachers or police or other authorities.
Over the past nearly 40 years, I have tried to bring up my three sons with good values using perhaps somewhat contrarian methods. I have just published it in an ebook format which you can check out here: “6 Golden Rules of Happy Parenting“. It is a 43 page ebook which contains real-life examples of bringing up children with a good balance of discipline and love! I sincerely hope that this will be my small contribution to help parents in the critical task of raising exemplary children.
Cheers.
