By Firdausi Muhammad Wambai
Activities and ceremonies in the past during marriages were carried out with decorum and not much spending; after the marriages couples lived harmoniously with scarce recourses and with utmost level of morals when children start popping in. People in those years relied on farming to feed their families and level of parental attachment to their task was high but nowadays people are jumping in to marriages without thinking responsibilities in them. The period of courtship built on lies leads to marriage but with imponderable marital problems, it is said that beauty leads many to their husband’s houses but their querulous attitudes drag them back to their parent’s houses.
The problems are not only peculiar to wives, in times without number turpitudinal fathers shun vital family needs but marry more wives to that erratic family. Most children that grew in such homes are usually recalcitrants and lacked good morals even if wives are trying; irresponsible husbands exacerbate the situation because they are habitually derailed. There are families with meager resources and not insightful enough to have time for nurturing children, even if one do not vacillate in training his wards well, daily mingle with friends from quixotic homes could affect and bastardize what parents built for years within minutes. Moral decay usually starts before matrimonies, whereby a father to be would be submissive to truculent decisions of the bride or her family even if he knows its ungodly.
Nowadays, you can find a home where teenage girls of 11 years that started menstruating but nobody care to enlighten them on measures to apply or what to do in order to keep herself odourless and tidy.
Diana Baumrind (1996) categorized parents in to three groups; Authoritarian parents are those that sternly controlled, over-strict in nature and in most times they are unresponsive to their task of parenting which ranges from financial, moral and harmonious relation with their children. Second set are permissive; they usually allow their children to do whatever please them without coaching them on the consequences of their wrong-doings; they are simple and non violent that’s why their children are mostly not respective which contributed in spreading their rusted habits to friends they mingle with.
The last category is referred to as uninvolved parents; they are totally insidious and neglectable in nature, they quiescent from doing whatever they are required to as heads of families. Succinctly, based on these three categories, child that grew under first category parents to be fustigated when they are wrong, second set are the nadir respected due to their careless attitudes to their task and the last set of parents makes one easily influenced and thereby tainting their morals and framing them as lukewarm in both psychological and physical strands. Morals decadence are therefore caused by irresponsible parenting, lacking means of income by most heads of the families lead to inability to carter for needs of family members; father who could not provide essentials hardly command his children to do what are right or punish them whenever wrong were done.
Secondly, some parents are always inebriated, smoking cigarette or marijuana in the present of their children, etc, children that bred by such parents are usually obstreperous and if care is not taken they could become doers of similar acts. In some homes, passive fathers allows their irresponsible wives to take over provision of food, clothing at times paying the house rent; decisions concluded by such wives on almost everything becomes final and children have retentive memories that cram both good and bad and the bad lead to decay in their morals . Indeed, some parents are totally permissive by leaving children to live on their own and that has recruited young ladies into prostitutions.
To end moral decadence in our societies, first of all parents should engage in beneficial ventures especially fathers that could be generating income for them, a home is respected in the society when their inhabitants are not hawking, begging or doing any illicit acts. If possible, parents should shun consumption or totally stop taking illicit drugs, smoking hemp or cigarette in the presence of their kids, parents caught doing it need to be decisively punished. All parents should be responsible and treat their children with love in moment of scarce resources, with care when they are endangered by either accident or mayhem, with kindness which can make them beneficial to a larger society because moral decay to one is decay to all!.
Firdausi Muhammad Wambai writes from the Department of Mass Communication, ATAPOLY Bauchi.
