Don’t abdicate your roles to maids, Fashola tells parents

Wife of the Lagos State Governor, Mrs. Abimbola Fashola, has cautioned parents against abdicating their roles in the general upkeep of their children to stewards and housemaids.

She linked the level of moral decadence among youths to lack of proper home training, arguing that the best thing parents could bequeath to the nation is to invest adequate time and attention in their children. Fashola, who was represented by the Director, Pension and Administration, Lagos State Teachers’ Establishment and Pensions Office, Mrs. Rhoda Ayinde, spoke at the maiden edition of the High Impact for Kids programme organised by Solution Media and Infotech Limited, a Hi-tech multimedia company in Lagos. The programme, which attracted over 50 schools drawn from Lagos State was designed to commemorate the 2013 Children’s Day celebration. She said, “Parents should lay a good foundation of character, integrity, honesty and discipline for their children right from their childhood. And this can only be done by investing time in their upbringing and not by being absentee parents who outsource responsibilities to house maids and nannies.

“The effect of parents not being there for their children is that these children are easily influenced by peer pressure while those nannies and house maids who are often uneducated fail to impact the right values in them which ultimately affect the nation negatively.”

Fashola advised children in the country to ensure that the right values being impacted by their parents and teachers and religious leaders were imbibed. “When our children imbibe and reflect the values of honesty, discipline and hardwork, that is when our hope for this country can be kept alive,” she adds. Executive Director, Solution Media and Infotech Limited, Mr. Adeyeloye Lipede, lamented the rate of assimilation of foreign culture by children and urged parents to integrate the teaching of Nigerian cultural values in their upbringing. “Ninety five percent of television programmes our children are exposed to are foreign and that is why many Nigerian children cannot even speak our indigenous languages anymore. This is worrisome because in the next 20 years, some of our local languages could go into extinction.

“Integrating the teaching of our rich cultural values in their upbringing will go a long way in making them do away with alien cultures and practices such as homosexuality, pornography among others.”