Take greater responsibility and raise upstanding children

I have really tried to avoid the Project X conversation. Having written several pieces about the teenage moral crisis, I however feel it would be remiss of me not to put forward my thoughts on the issue. Firstly, this issue is way beyond an event; it is about a moral crisis that is destroying our society. What shocked me about the Project X issue was not the project itself, I was shocked by the parents’ shock. I wondered where these parents, who are acting so scandalised, live. How could they even imagine that CS Joseph Nkaissery banning this “project” was some victory, that we were now back to moral safety?

The teen sex and drug crises has been with us for a long while and the only new thing is that it is advertising itself with such brazen audaciousness. I tell people that the reality of the crisis was brought to me one Sunday morning when I sat reading my morning paper outside a chemist’s shop. As I sat in my car, I noted a succession of skimpily, but expensively dressed young girls, walking in and out of the shop. After some time, curiosity got the better of me and I went and inquired of the pharmacist what the young ones were buying. That’s when I learnt of “Postinor” which I now know is the most popular of the “morning after” emergency contraceptives. My shock was threefold. First was the age of the girls. I can bet none of these tots were above 16. Secondly, their large numbers. Thirdly I was alarmed that these girls had no fear of Aids or the numerous life long STDs that arise from unprotected sexual behaviour. Clearly, if you were imbibing Postinor, you had engaged in unprotected sex!

Being the father of three teenagers then, I sought to investigate for myself the lives of these youngsters who otherwise looked all innocent during the day. I spent several weeks driving into their favourite hangouts like the Racecourse, Museum Hill and Westland’s own “Electric Avenue”. Those weeks were sobering. They left me with a fear for the future of this generation. I was shocked at how boundary-less relationships had become. At the Museum Hill parking lot young “couples” were engaged in open sexual activity. All manner of pills and drugs were being consumed inside various dance halls where young people collected ID cards from those who had been let in and distributed them to the under-aged in full view of the security. I can bet their parents believed their kids were in some innocent “sleep over”.

Project X has been going on for a long while. We have just chosen to bury our heads in the sand. I tried to understand what had gone wrong. While this is not the whole story, I am convinced that part of the problem is we parents losing the plot. Not only are we largely absent from our children’s lives, we compensate our absence with liberal “everything goes” material laden parenting. We leave our parenting to television, teachers, the church and our overworked house servants. We forgot that the parenting we underwent may not have been intense but we were living in a different time. Our children are growing up in a time where success and “with-it-ness” is defined by the television, Instagram, and other social media. The social networks that co-parented us are long gone. I remember growing up knowing to fear and to impress not just my parents, but my many uncles, aunts and numerous neighbours. That is not our children’s lot, and this puts immense responsibilities on us parents.

Unfortunately we are busy competing with the Joneses to provide a better life for the family. And if the morning conversations on FM stations are reflective of us, we are not mentors of morality anyway. And so predators who know that kids hooked to the promise of drugs alcohol and sex are a good long term investment are taking advantage. Woe unto us if we assume that cancelling one event and marching teenagers to court has resolved our problems. We have a crisis and unless we, as families, own it and its solution, which must include investing time, we are taking a bold step to a dangerous abyss.