Threats to the family are aplenty that we cannot and must not just rely on authorities for protection. Children of school-going age need parental care and protection more than what authorities can provide. We know too well that authorities could only provide limited supervision and protection to school children. School authorities can only oversee school children while in the confines of the school premises.
Beyond class hours and outside the school campus, we cannot expect school authorities to still be responsible for school children. It is the responsibility of parents to do their share in providing care and protection to their children after school. While there are police authorities providing school safety and protection, they too can only do so much of their task within the area of the school.
Reports regarding students being duped into vices and other undesirable activities by peers must be a cause for concern among parents. These problems are prevalent among high school students who are found in groups that engage in off-campus activities. These youthful students call their groups as fraternities and sororities. Observers however consider these groups as gangs for they do not have the characteristics of real fraternities and sororities. All that these groups do are nefarious activities like forcedly collecting money from hapless students who are threatened with harm by the gang.
In other instances, these groups engage in misguided activities. They do not have any clear purpose than enjoy the company of their gang doing what they want to do afar from the sight of their busy parents. Students of this generation seem lacking in parental guidance and influenced by misguided elements of society. We are aware how peer groups take primacy among the influential factors in the life of students. It poses to parents the great challenge of combating the evil forces that drag students to misguided activities. We cannot rely on others, not even authority figures, for the care, protection and guidance of our children.
But we must give attention to the factors that lead to the way students behave today. We may unconsciously be allowing our children to take misguided paths. A lot of media blitz from television programs require parental guidance but parents simply do not care providing children the needed guidance. In school, values education is part of the curriculum but matters like children’s rights and related topics on freedom and privacy sometimes go offhand, giving the students the wrong notion of independence and less respect for parental guidance.
In their eagerness to assert the rights being taught in school, students often go beyond the parameters by totally excluding parental guidance in the vocabulary. The indoctrination of wrong and misguided values by various sectors are the unwitting cause why students are falling into unwanted and undesirable activities. All these may still be traced to seeming lack if not the utter failure of parental guidance.
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