Parents need lessons in loving their children

There needs to be some intervention for Jamaican parents, as trends show children need a lot more from their caregivers in terms of love and stability. Seeking these elements elsewhere often leads to problems that do not just affect the particular households, but the society.

Poor parenting symptom of greater problem

7 Nov 2022

THE BASIS for the apparent conclusion that Jamaica’s parents are inclined to unburden their obligations on to schools and teachers is not entirely clear. But if the data shared last week by Kaysia Kerr, CEO of National Parenting Support Commission (NPSC), at the launch of the annual observation of Child Month, is the foundation of that perception – assuming that the reporting on her remarks was contextually accurate – a more nuanced interpretation of the situation may be necessary.

It may be that many parents are just bewildered and confused by their circumstance that they find it hard to cope. So, without specifically saying so, parents may be calling out for help.

At last week’s function, Ms Kerr quoted a survey done by her agency in September, in which 7.5 per cent (34) of the parents of a sample of 450 (which, Ms Kerr acknowledged, was not sufficiently large to extrapolate national trends, but enough to begin to provide insights) said that they did not knew how to effectively communicate with their children. It is not clear how deeply this question was explored to determine the basis of this inability, or, perhaps, sense of inadequacy.

However, according to Ms Kerr, there is“a deep level of apathy ”among parents. And she found it “troubling ”that many appeared to be shifting parenting responsibilities to teachers.

“You can imagine if we have a community of people saying we can’t bother,” Ms Kerr said. “We are in a quandary, because parenting is the single most important role that any human being will ever undertake, and it is something to take seriously. In previous years, we talked about planning for parenthood the way we talked about planning for everything else in our lives.”

CONCERN NOT NEW

This concern about parenting is not new. And neither is it unique to Ms Kerr and her agency. Policymakers have been concerned about its consequences for Jamaica’s economic and social stability. That is precisely why the NPSC was founded.

Indeed, around the same time Ms Kerr was expressing her disquiet about the attitudes of parents, the police chief, Antony Anderson, was talking about his concerns over the involvement of adolescents in crime and violence and appealing for community help to cauterise the problem.

Mr Anderson, for instance, reported that since 2019, children between the ages of 15 and 17 (a cohort representing a bit over four per cent of the population) was responsible for 79 murders – about two per cent of the homicides reported over the period. This age group was also involved in 66 shootings, and accounted for 175 rapes, 65 aggravated assaults, and 175 break-ins.

That data are not the only evidence of the involvement of young people in crime. Recently, in the wake of their post-pandemic reopening, Jamaica schools, which have long had a problem of student-on-student violence, have reported an escalation of fights and other altercations, some involving family members of students. At least two students have been killed in schoolyard incidents.

“We all must take this matter more seriously, as the pandemic of violence is infecting our children,”the police chief said. “They (adolescents) are not merely innocent victims of violence; in far too many instances, children and adolescents are actually the perpetrators of violence.”

The police commissioner called for “collective” action to steer children away from becoming career criminals. “We (the police) are bringing this to the nation’s attention because, as a society, we have to decide how we are going to save them,” he said.

ALREADY AWARE

The fact, however, is that Jamaicans are already aware of the deepening crisis and that it is part of a deeper dysfunction that manifests not only in Jamaica’s high levels of criminal violence, but public disorder, corruption, and distrust of the public bureaucracy and other institutions of the State. It is a problem for which the country has not yet evolved a credible, or sustainable, fix.

This newspaper, or course, does not doubt that some parents have a “deep level of apathy” towards their children and of their roles and responsibilities as guardians, nurturers, and caregivers. We would be surprised, though, especially in the absence of supporting data, if this was anything near a majority.

Anecdotal observations suggest that, especially early in their lives, Jamaican parents, like parents almost everywhere, have deep bonds with their children. The causes for its breakdown are varied and complex. But the fact that an overwhelming majority (92 per cent) admit to not having the skills to communicate with their children suggests that their burden is deeper than apathy or voluntary withdrawal. It is as much a signal, perhaps, of surrender and defeat – a frank and desperate acknowledgement of an incapacity to cope.

The larger point, as was implicit in Commissioner Anderson’s observations, is that while the problem of poor parenting must be the target of a major assault, it cannot be divorced from Jamaica’s other social problems: economic and social privations, crime, urban decay, and, critically, public corruption. Weakened institutions that exist in an environment of low levels of trust cannot support social stability.

Quite obviously, a mass programme of teaching people how to parent, akin to the JAMAL literacy campaign of the 1970s, is necessary. But it also has to be underpinned by a similar assault against corruption in all its forms.

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