By Damilola Kushimo
A counsellor in Okota Senior Grammar School, Abdul-Ganiyu Salaudeen, has charged parents to always keep eyes on their children to raise responsible youths.
He urged the parents to improve their care for their children while guiding them on the right paths.
The counsellor, who noted the rate of social vices among the youths, said the rot in the society is caused by a lack of parental care and good parenting.
In a chat with ECHONEWS, the counsellor explained that parental monitoring is significant in the cycle of guidance a child needs to be properly raised and dissuaded from being wayward and involving in social vices.
Salaudeen, who doubles as the Assistant Secretary of the Association of Professional Counsellors in Nigeria (APROCON), explained that the parents’ quest for family needs should not override other parental activities on their children, stressing that parental negligence accounts for the incessant unrest witnessed in the community.
He said more needs to be done by the parents to complement the activities of school counsellors in raising well-groomed and responsible children in the society.
He also appealed to the government to increase the numbers of counsellors in schools and relieve counsellors of class works in order to solely focus on counselling activities.
“Our work and that of the parents on monitoring and guidance go hand-in-hand but I think the parents need to do more because presently parents are very busy in search of money to cater for the family but that should not prevent them from performing other parental duties. Parents should have time for their children, know the friends they keep, the time they leave home, the time they close in school and the time they get home. When parents are not there monitoring their activities, you’ll find out that the children will loiter around with friends who will lure them into doing bad activities. The adverse effects of parental negligence are what we are experiencing in the society today mostly from children who are within the age 13 and 18. They perpetrate social vices confidently because the needed monitoring expected from their parents is missing,” he stated.
