New age parenting; thin boundaries

Mother and son goofing outdoors. [istockphoto]

What does she think of modern parenting? "Is modern-day parenting even parenting? she poses.

"It's become like a partnership where each party has a right to something. Parents can't discipline their children because they don't even know them. Both parties are sometimes strangers.

"There is moral decline, no respect for authority and even no respect for life itself from the young ones. The child feels the parent is old fashioned and therefore can't tell him anything. Children fear nothing."

Mercy Wanjiru, another mother of a teenage son thinks advances in technology have created a social conflict with media exposure influencing the way parents and children think.

"The older way of parenting created fear. In those days technology wasn't advanced while today's children know their rights by observing trends in advanced lands," she says.

According to one local journalist who is also a mother, peer pressure makes young people prioritize the opinions and influence of their peers over their parents' guidance.

This makes it difficult for parents to provide positive influences and shape the child's values and behaviour and curtailing their emotional development.

"Lack of respect and authority where children perceive themselves as almost equal to their parents makes it difficult to establish and maintain a respectful and authoritative parent-child relationship. This can lead to lack of discipline, defiance, and a disregard for parental guidance," she says.

Clash of old and new

Cheryl Mwangi, a counselling psychologist with Kidsalive Kenya says the old style of parenting dealt more with structure rather than nurture.

Today's parents, she adds, have lost the structure but are nurturing their children and compensating for what they never received hence the thin parent-child boundaries.

"These are parents who will not beat their children to avoid annoying them but end up creating entitled brats. Some parents may not understand what parenting is all about.

"We saw this during Covid-19 when parents did not want children at home and felt they were being forced to parent. Some even told the teachers they did not know how spoilt their children were. But children need structures to thrive," says Mwangi.

Mwangi says lack of balance between structured and nurturing results in children who do not know the difference between what is acceptable or not.

"A boy who does not know proper boundaries between him and his mother will one day treat a girl inappropriately and still feel entitled. Such a boy will not learn how to handle any rejection in a relationship," says Mwangi.

If we do not step back and rethink parenting in the new age, she says, we will see the bad results of such leniency in the next 20 to 30 years, if not earlier. "There is no perfect parent but we can improve".