Build a strong evaluation mechanism in our young.

Did you read about the sixteen year old student who burgled her family’s house to pay off a debt for a one thousand ringgit download of pornographic clips into her mobile phone? She was assisted by two of her friends. This was reported three days ago in the Star newspaper.

From the news, that student turned herself and her friends in out of fear when police began investigations following a police report lodged by her father.

Something is obviously very wrong when such a young girl would be daring enough to download one thousand ringgit worth of pornographic material into her phone. Since we do not know her family background or how she had been brought up, we are unable to pinpoint where the fault lies.

However, no one would download so much pornographic material, especially when it is so unaffordable for her, unless the person’s mind is obsessed with such things.

Certainly, she must be in the wrong company as the friends who helped her to break into her family home were the people who supplied her with the pornographic material. She could be a victim of people out to profit from providing such material. But she seemed a willing victim to download such a huge amount.
Whatever it is, there must have been something amiss in the parenting of this girl.

We cannot control outside forces but we can ensure that children are brought up with solid values, be they cultural, moral or religious. Good parenting is the defence against bad external influences. If young children are consistently well brought up to respect right values and have a disdain for wrong values, such parenting is internalized and will be the core evaluating mechanism for all external influences which challenges our young each day as they face the world.

Of course, even with such parenting in place, mistakes can happen. After all, every child is just as human as any other. However, such a child will not be easily lead to the stage where even when the wrong becomes too expensive, she would go on even to the extend of commiting another bigger mistake. Realisation and the parent-established evaluation mechanism will stop any further mistakes.

As I see it, good parenting for our young is increasingly important in the face of the great variety of problems that beset our world from so many quarters. At a time when more and more parents are preoccupied with work outside the home, parenting suffers unless parents are willing to spend most of their off-work hours with their children to give them love and guidance, to teach them about the world they live in.