Some days ago, I was going through some content on the internet. The writer wrote a poem of 10 lines that passed a huge message across about the unavailability of parents in the life of their children.
She described how she felt when she was young when her mom used to tell her to go meet her grandmother but now that she is a mother she now understands what her mom must have felt back then.
Parental negligence is the failure of a parent to take good care of their child/ward. It has become a very rampant thing in our country even in other countries too as many children never experience what is called parenting.
Many parents ignore their children; they neglect them and make them feel unwanted, which is why some children don’t know how to open up and speak up about the problems they are facing to their parents because they are not in any way close to their parents, especially the mother.
Many children have gone astray because their parents have little or no time for them at all, some have been influenced by their friends’ attitudes and due to the peer pressure all around, they give up at last and replicate bad attitudes simply because these friends are the ones that listen and make them feel less bothered about their parent’s unavailability.
Many children have been sexually abused without their parents getting to know them because they couldn’t tell their parents due to the anger and fear enclosed in them towards their parents for neglecting them. Some children even find it difficult to look into their parent’s eyes without even talking with them because they believe they do not exist in their lives.
Many children have been depressed due to lack of parental care because whenever they see their mate with their family, they feel sad, some even find it difficult to cope with life to the extent that they begin to look for happiness in the wrong place or wrong aspects such as taking drugs (cocaine, marijuana and all sorts), going into prostitution, taking alcohol and lot more.
Causes Of Parental Negligence
- Single Parenting: This is so common, especially for those that carry the pain they’ve gone through but this raise has raised my concern the most because I believe it is not the fault of the child that things turned out that way, then; Why do these mothers decide to let an innocent child suffer for the things they are never guilty of? Why do they have to go through pain because of something they know nothing about?
- Poverty: Children who come from poor homes get neglected because their parents are always busy and always working so as to make enough money to feed their children. As a result of this, they leave their children in the street where they roam around and mix with different children from different backgrounds which may affect them in the future.
- Workaholic Parents: Many parents put their work first in their life instead of God and their family, they will rather leave their children in the care of their house help(s) or neighbour and this may result in a broken relationship between the parent and child. When they need to talk to their parents they will prefer talking to these people who may have a bad motive or intention. Many parents believe money and food are everything a child needs and this is not so important to a child compared to the time they long for and love to spend with their parents.
Ways to prevent parental negligence
- Parents should be educated on the repercussions of neglecting their children.
- Establish an organisation that will help in handling parents who are vulnerable.
- Family planning: couples should go for family planning so as to plan for the number of children they want to give birth to and be able to take care of.
- Teenagers should be educated on the repercussions of unwanted pregnancy and parents should try as possible not to create fear in their hearts.
Way to help parental negligence victims
- Counselling: Victims of parental negligence are very vulnerable so they need to be counselled about a lot of things they never had the opportunity to learn about.
- Show them love: They need to show be shown love in order to quicken their healing process.
- Build a good relationship with them: They need to be close to you so as to help them build their trust and talk about how they feel inside and ask questions.
- Don’t be too harsh on them: If you are too harsh, this may place a boundary to the way they will open up to you sensitive issues
