By Wandia Njoya via FB
Apparently my post on kids, parents and social behavior is doing the rounds, but reinforcing the very message which I hate: parents are failing in raising their kids.
No. I’m not saying parents are failing in raising their kids. I’m saying that adults are failing the younger generation. That’s the problem.
A few weeks ago, some parents invited me to talk about education, and one of the questions I was to answer was “How do we prepare our children for the gig economy?”
I did not answer that question because I didn’t know where to start. How do you tell parents that they are leading their kids to a slaughter house? And yet, they were open enough to ask the question.
This failure of parents is not a moral question of teaching manners. It’s an intellectual problem of not understanding what world we are living in. The world isn’t what we 40 to 50 year olds were raised for. It’s something else. Our children are misbehaving not because we’re not teaching them manners at home. In fact, it’s almost fruitless to try. The problem is that we’re living in a world that structually has no manners.
So this video is to help the parents understand the world, so that they know why they should NOT prepare their kids for the gig economy.
And no, I’m not saying that parents abandoned their role. That’s evangelical nonsense. I’m saying that we have all abandoned our POLITICAL role of fighting for better education, cultural space and economic justice.
I teach 20 year olds and I can see their despair. They can see you parents are lying when you tell them to behave. They know crooks are rich and that economy is a mess. Where do you expect them to deal with that contradiction? Even I would drink myself silly if I were them.
Kids outgrow the home, surely. If you think a parent can keep a teenager on a leash, you’re being irrational. What we need is for you to put on your citizen minds and do what Renee Ngamau did the other day: fight against the grabbing of land where children play.
Fight for cultural spaces for the arts. Stop accepting the lie that the arts have no market.
People who are twisting my words to say that parents abandoned their role are not thinking. We need parents who think POLITICALLY. Not parents who think morally and think James Dobson’s “Focus on the family” can solve political problems.
