Society, not parents to blame for children's vulnerability

Editor, Reference is made to Benoit Talemwa’s article, “Investing in our children, securing our future” (The New Times, February 17). Certainly a great piece, but how can ‘modern’ parents create time for their kids when they themselves no longer have time to enjoy life themselves? Truth be told, modern parents’ investment priority is not in their children. They tend to give priority to financial capital investments instead. And this is the priority imposed to everyone by policymakers in all avenues of ‘modern’ life. Financial capital, having been given priority the world over since the last two centuries, all life decisions and conduct within collectivities have been subjected to the sole aim of monetary exchange at the marketplace. No longer time to live! There’s only time to make money by all means, and a lot of it when and where possible. Consciously or not, all modern parents are victims of this Western modernist ideology of “Time is money”. And yet they are blamed for not alleviating the multiple flaws of this ideology, one of those flaws being the fallacy of being parents of children who don’t ‘belong’ to us anymore. ‘Modern’ children belong to the market, to the nation now entirely organised into a market. And yet, when those children later fail to ‘make money’, their parents are first to blame. On ‘double-bind syndrome’, naturally, as opposed to the artificial and alien market ideology, an offspring of any living entity is an ‘investment’—not in monetary capital sense—into the continuation and sustainment of life. Parents are thus by all means, physiological, psychological, and socially, and called to fulfill this visceral ‘mission’. But, at the same time, nowadays parents and their offspring are called and forcibly ushered into the marketplace: call it nation, school, labour force, etc. And, yet, no mother anywhere in the world voluntarily opts to (re-) join the marketplace only a couple of months after giving birth, entrusting her most precious ‘investment’, her newborn, into the hands of a nanny at home or at the Crèche! No mother anywhere in the world who wouldn’t opt to stay at home, raising her children. Francois-Xavier Nziyonsenga

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Society, not parents to blame for children's vulnerability