Protecting your own

We often read tragic stories regarding young children. Unfortunately, we live in a brutal society where the most vulnerable segment – children – are often not protected by their own families and parents.

Take, for example, stories involving children falling into open manholes – a very unfortunate and entirely avoidable tragedy. Who is to blame for this? The municipal authority which failed to ensure all manholes were properly covered and not death traps? Or politicians who make a lot of promises but don’t deliver on the provision of even the most basic of services? Or the government of the day which couldn’t guarantee the four-year-old boy the right to a life safe from harm to his personal wellbeing?

While much of the media reporting does cover these aspects – especially that which relates to the government, the municipal authority or the politicians – it generally fails to talk about one major culprit in all of this: parents and their role in protecting their children.

Why is there hardly any mention of the role and responsibility of parents in such tragic incidents? Why do they let their children – who are sometimes as young as four or five years old – venture out of the home without a family adult or completely unsupervised?

A majority of such cases happen in low-income areas, where both parents work – often in domestic jobs – and where children are left at home to be looked after by relatives or older siblings. It is because of economic considerations and the need to feed their families that people work long hours and have no choice but to leave their children in the care of relatives or sometimes neighbours. But there are often cases where parents who were in the home allowed their children to play outside the home or venture out without an older family member – and then something terrible happened.

Speaking of the responsibilities of parents in our society, let’s move on to what is currently a hot topic, especially among families in the urban areas of Pakistan. And this relates to the amount of screen time children are exposed to. One hears parents moan and groan about the perils of excessive screen time that their children are exposed to, yet they do nothing to monitor or regulate it, let alone restrict or prohibit it. In fact, in many instances, parents who complain that their children are on the phone or the laptop all the time are often guilty of excessive screen time themselves.

Another common thing that happens in Pakistani society is the tendency for young children (less than ten years of age) to go to bed very late, even on a school night. And proof of this can easily be found in public areas frequented by families where young children accompany them for dinner – the only issue is that dinner is eaten usually quite late, close to midnight and it seems as if the parents of such children don’t care much whether the child misses school the next day. In this too, parental responsibility is seriously lacking.

Yet another example that is all too common in this part of the world is when a father who is driving a car does so with a baby in his lap. Nowhere in this world would something as dangerous be tolerated and a driver who did this would be heavily fined – not least because such a silly act would first and foremost place risk the lives of other motorists and road users. However, what we see is that the traffic police don’t do anything about it – presumably because driving a car with your baby in your lap and endangering the lives of others on the road is seen as an internal family matter and decision.

There needs to be greater awareness and debate on the role and responsibility of parents given that the home and family perhaps shape a child’s personality and character the most, along with of course the schooling. The media needs to discuss this as well and parents whose children suffer as a result of their (the parents) actions should be held accountable for their neglect.

The writer is a journalist based in Karachi. He tweets/posts @omar_quraishi and can be reached at: omarrquraishi@gmail.com