Raising Children in a Broken Paradigm

I do pop culture workshops for youth interested in performing arts. I point out the immense influence the media has over our daily lives. I point out that anything that has a corporate sponsor serves that sponsors agenda. I point out how much it encourages us to consume and to compete. I point out how we become either driven or disenfranchised by the countless measures of what we have and what we think that means or what we think we lack and what that says about us. In these workshops I often start this particular conversation with a query to the young ladies. I ask what pressures they feel to dress, behave, and think in certain ways because of what they have seen in the media. For the purpose of this conversation I use music videos as the text for our examination. I of course am trying to help them be able to see and voice the exploitive nature of women measured in hips and ass for entertainment purposes. The workshops get even more heated when I suggest that the videos also exploit men.

We are given markers for normality and markers for disenfranchised behavior. A friend from another country on observing some North American African youth hanging out at a bus stop was moved to hysteria in fear of passing them. They were just being young, bantering, shoving, swearing and being in their reality, which by course negates anything or one over 25 years old. They at no point posed a real threat. My friend shared with me the source of his fear and his certainty they were all armed and ready to gank him at any minute. His source of information was videos broadcast internationally that portray black thugs and Gangsta’s with dope and guns.

Even youth of the dominant culture suffer because of these markers. Often snapping under the pressure of recreating “is” as is. They flirt with quasi-disenfranchisement in their youth with the ability to stop dying their hair green, covering their tats, letting their piercings close and joining the family firm. Yet many suffer in the translation and suffer as much from coercive mirroring as do their counterparts at the margins. We all suffer when they take the stereotype they were trying to be back into their reality as experienced gospel.

In a paradigm that encourages generational splits and has no rites of passage. We allow our children to stumble into adult hood bludgeoned by angst generating pop culture being led mostly by each other. Our youth suffer double time as they make mistakes already made and learn only in time to teach their own youth who of course will not listen and thus we are locked into perpetually inventing the wheel.

In a country that has in many ways removed parents from parenting and now flirt with novel ideas like parenting classes because children don’t come with manuals, in our modernity we forget basic human fundamentals. The job of a parent is to raise well-adjusted adults who contribute to humanity and are capable of raising children who can do the same. We must realize and break cycles even those imposed by society in the cases where society’s method does not serve to make strong families. The family is and has been the cornerstone and mirror for society. If families are strong; we all benefit. If they are not; we all suffer.

Perhaps we should invent this societies rites of passage anew. Consider children who do not look to leave the family and recreate the wheel but who take their place within family systems that nurture the young and provide for the old. What if we make extended family in vogue again and learn to do well together instead of struggling apart? What if we respected the contributions of all, young and old, and became invincible in our shinning beauty? What if perfected humanism was the goal we taught our youth to strive for instead of amassing silver and gold that ultimately weighs the soul down? What if we believed that was the most valuable thing to pass on to them? What if old age was revered and we taught the youth that by honoring our own elders? What if children were considered gifts instead of possessions? What if we weren’t afraid of change and could embrace it? What if we thought our love was the best gift to give a child? What if children thought so too? What if we all remembered being 11, 14, 17? What if we told the truth even when that meant we were wrong or we did not know? What if…

Ayodele Nzinga