Parents of past generations would always tell you that parenting is very difficult and challenging, but there is certainly no harder time to be a parent than in this digital age.
With the entire internet at our disposal, it becomes a Herculean task for parents to raise their children the way they desire without negative influence from several quarters.
Many so-called tech experts and writers claim that children need freedom with gadgets, that devices are key to children’s success and that in this digital age, kids learn best through exposure to the latest gadgets. Parents then provide tablets, smartphones and other gadgets for their kids and that becomes a very big problem both in families and the larger society. These kids, through the internet learn all manner of unimaginable things. While some of the male children are addicted to video games, the females are crazy about increasing the number of their social media friends and are ready to do even immoral things to achieve that. The painful thing is that most parents may not have an idea about what their children do on social media.
Watching the mother of the 10-year-old girl of Chrisland School, Lagos, allegedly raped by her school mates agonisingly pleading with Nigerians to help seek justice for her daughter, I could not help but imagine the pains of the family at the present time. For a child to be involved in such a negative story is the last wish of any parent.
But much as one sympathises with the family, after listening and reading the narratives of those who watched the sex tape and many comments, the family’s side of the story seem less convincing. Some say that from the atmosphere in the room, the girl’s expressions and body movement, the act did not appear like a rape and that the girl seemed to be a guru in the act.
It will not be surprising if her parents, especially her mother, had no idea about how wild their kid may have become. Just as they may not be aware that their little daughter is said to have a prominent online presence on the Likee microblogging platform, where she posts all kinds of indecent things and has an encouraging number of followers and viewers.  One wonders if at the tender age of ten, this child knows the implication of what she is doing. Upon interrogation, it may just be found out that she probably must have seen people doing it either on the internet or at home and engages in those acts innocently.
Recently a story was told in a women’s group about how a member’s 11-year-old daughter made a pornographic video of herself and was about posting it on the internet when her mother intercepted it.  The shocked mother wanted to know what led her to such an act and she said she stumbled upon a porn site when she was using her mother’s phone to do her on-line classes during the peak of Covid-19, and had been watching it whenever she had an opportunity to grab an internet enabled gadget. She apparently did not know the implication of what she was doing. She just wanted to film herself and send online just as the ones she had been watching.
However, parents need to do more. There is a need to teach the kids self-control and how to use technology responsibly. I was impressed to watch an online speaker advising that parents should not buy phones for their children until after their secondary school. That has always been my position. Definitely, they will kick against it and tell you how all their friends and even juniors in school own android phones. But maintain your ground. Make them understand that your decision is in their best interest.
According to a child and adolescent psychologist, Richard Freed, parents can raise more responsible children despite the tech-obsessed culture of this age by applying authoritative parenting, the most effective parenting style, to your kids’ tech use. Authoritative parents, in his view, are loving and highly engaged in children’s lives, and they provide high expectations and limits to support those expectations.
He further admonished, “to be loving and engaged with our children, it is best if parents and kids have lots of time away from devices to be fully present with one another. And to provide kids high expectations and limits, parents should not try to be their children’s friend, but rather understand that they have the responsibility to set tech limits (even when kids push back) to foster distraction-free family moments, reading, and study time.
“Consider employing the rule used by many leading tech executives that children and teens do not use screens and phones in their bedrooms. This encourages kids to spend time in shared family spaces and also increases the odds that they will use computers and other devices productively.”
Indeed, parents need to create more time for their children, try as much as possible to monitor their activities, set limits and most importantly, be a good role model. A lot of parents, by their lifestyle, are leading their children astray. A lot of parents know that their children have behavioural problems, they protect them from such deviant problems and do not want schools to sanction them.
Some schools on the other hand, particularly private schools are not willing to punish some badly behaved students because they are children or relations of some highly influencial people in the country or they are afraid of losing their parents’ or guardians’ patronage.  So, they go on covering their ills and these children go on being terrors unto their fellow students.
The same attitude of covering up wrong doings could be seen in the Chrisland Schools management’s handling of the sex scandal. According to the mother of the girl involved in the scandal, the school authorities concealed the matter for over one month, did not tell either her or her husband what happened, conducted pregnancy tests on her daughter without their consent and even warned her never to tell her mum what had happened in Dubai.
The school on the other hand claimed that futile efforts were made to inform the parents about the incident. They eventually expelled the girl indefinitely while the  male students that took part in the improper behaviour were suspended. But for social media, the school might have succeeded in hushing up the case.
What many people still find difficult to understand is how a school could take these little children to a foreign land and leave them unpoliced. Where were the adults that travelled with these kids the whole period the “Truth or Dare” game that culminated in the improper behaviour took place? Were the boys and girls meant to be together? If not, how did the girl find her way into the room where the act took place?
One just hopes the Lagos Police Command, the Lagos State Government and other authorities involved in investigating the matter will do a thorough job, get to the root of it and whoever displayed any act of negligence in the case, duly punished.
We must begin to enforce the available laws and punish people who are negligent in the duty of taking care of our children – the minders, administrators, teachers, caregivers and others. Our children need to be adequately protected.
These incidents are becoming one too many – the Sylvester Oromoni of Dowen College, Lekki, Lagos State, Karen-Happuch Akpagher of Premiere Academy, Lugbe, Abuja, etc.- and they keep happening because the culprits are hardly punished. Each time these cases happened, a panel would be set up to investigate it and hardly do governments implement the recommendations of those panels. This Chrisland’s case should be different.

By: Calista Ezeaku