A few days ago, a young person at home asked me a simple question: why would the police shame people? It came amid the growing public debate over how people dress at entertainment events, what counts as decent in public, and the role of law enforcement in policing it. I have thought about that question since, not because I lack a position on values — I believe culture, family, and faith matter, and that adults carry a responsibility to raise children with standards. But the harder question is this: did something go wrong with our parenting, or did society simply move faster than our parenting could keep up? Rwanda has deliberately opened space for entertainment, tourism, fashion, and the wider creative economy. We want Kigali to be a global city, and that ambition is real progress, but every industry carries a culture with it. When entertainment grows, fashion changes, when social media grows, ideas about popularity change. When algorithms decide what millions of young people see each day, parents are no longer the only ones shaping a child's sense of what is normal. This is where we may have fallen behind: we built the infrastructure for a new culture faster than we built the parenting systems for navigating it. For generations, parents could assume that home, school, church, and neighborhood were the main influence on a child's values. That world has changed; a child can now sit in their bedroom and absorb thousands of images, trends, and lifestyles from around the world before breakfast. The culture no longer enters through the front door — it is already inside the room, and it sometimes carries more weight than the parent. That should concern us, not because everything from the outside world is bad, but because children are encountering enormous amounts of information without always having the maturity to interpret it. So, our response should not begin with policing, it should begin with formation. Decency itself has never been fixed, what one generation calls indecent, another calls fashionable; what one family accepts, another does not. That does not mean there are no standards — it means we must distinguish a moral standard from a personal preference, and a venue's dress rule from a nationwide law. The recent debate around clothing at entertainment venues, like the current concern over illicit alcohol, shows the same pattern: enforcement addresses a symptom, but it cannot raise a child; police can enforce laws, schools can teach, churches can preach, governments can regulate but families must form character. Perhaps we have confused parenting with protection. For a long time, good parenting meant don't watch that, don't wear that, don't go there. Today's children need something more sophisticated — they need to know why. Rules work when authority is present; conviction works when nobody is watching. We have sometimes trained children to obey rules without training them to hold convictions. I call myself a liberal parent, though I mean something specific by it. I am comfortable letting my children choose, but that freedom came after real investment: in conversation, in exposure to different ideas, in faith, in helping them understand consequences. I want their choices to come from an informed conscience, not blind rebellion or blind obedience. Freedom without formation is not liberation; it can be abandonment. Control without formation is not morality; it can simply be fear. Rwanda's progress makes this conversation more urgent, not less. We have built one of the highest levels of women's political representation in the world. Our ambition should not stop at seats in Parliament, it should extend to raising young people, boys and girls alike, who understand dignity, responsibility, and freedom together. That is a far bigger project than regulating hemlines. So, did parenting miss the moment? Perhaps but there is still time, parents must become more curious, and more willing to sit with difficult questions rather than shutting them down, because our children are already asking them — sometimes without us. The writer is an author, publisher and market systems expert.
