A video that went viral showed a teenage boy destroying his parents’ house. He had smashed everything because his mother refused to give him his passport; he seized her phone and car keys. And while he was on rampage the mother and another woman kept looking at him. They didn’t try to stop him, apparently afraid of him, though the mother kept explaining what led to that episode.
Another man tried to pacify the young boy and walked up to him slowly, put his arm around him and said, “You know I love you,” but the boy went ahead and smashed a door or window glass with a mop stick.
While commenting on the video some people prayed against such a horrible thing to happen to them and prayed for their children and descendants (zuri’a) to be of good character, some said he must be on drugs, some asked why the mother or those around didn’t call the police.
And it makes sense where a small child could pick up a phone and call the police to his parents; the parents could also call the police to a child that has gone beyond where you could tolerate insolence even by the standard of the western countries.
About a year or so ago, another teenage boy was also seen in a viral video fighting with his mother in a western country and it became a topic of discussions in some media platforms.
A part from the usual outrage people express in such cases, there is an underlining problem confronting people that live abroad on how to bring up their children; would it be how they themselves were brought up with the usual cane if they did something wrong, the respect for parents and elders and conforming to religious and societal norms, or would it be according to the permissive society they live in, where children talk back to their parents and the parents say they are sorry for offending them, where homosexuals and lesbians are accepted and you cannot talk against that, and even the existence of God is questioned and accepted as freedom of expression and thought, where teenage pregnancy or coupling is the norm, where at eighteen years of age children can move out of their parents’ house and live alone, with a boyfriend or girlfriend or parents’ worst fears to become gays by living with same sex as couples, after all same sex marriage is accepted there. And even indulge in drugs.
It is a dilemma, but some try as much as possible to train their children in accordance with their own culture and religion which is not easy because the society they live in is not like that and their orientation is of that society. Some however are very lax, believing they have to conform one hundred percent to that society, so they over indulge their children and the children turn out worse than the indigenes of those societies.
And through the behaviour of the young boy , it tends to portray that all the people in those countries are badly behaved, which is not the case, you see well behaved young boys and girls.
Therefore, sometimes those that are foreigners try to do more of such things, just because they find themselves at liberty in a tolerant society. After all, this kind of behavior would not be tolerated in Nigeria whether he is under the influence of drugs or not. He would not even dare it; it is not something that is accepted here.
For example the man that went to him and put his arm around him and told him, “you know I love you,” would have given him a sharp slap, what some call a dirty slap, because this ‘ I love you’ in such circumstances in alien to us, but the man has to conform because he lives in that society. And if he beats him he would be arrested by the police.
This makes some to think twice about living in those countries because what is the gain if after all your struggle and sacrifice to raise your children in the western world where it is thought to be a privilege they turn out to be gays or atheists? And there is nothing you can do about it. In order to conform, you would say you accept them as they are and you still love them.
Nobody wants his children to become deviants and people pray fervently for good progeny, so people may not deliberately set out to make their children to become bad but they should examine how they train them so that they can be proud of them and not to be a source of concern to them.
