Parents, you have to rein in your children

Parents must take responsibility for their children – government can only do so much. We need to take back our classrooms and schools.

Forest High School, where one of school pupils was stabbed to death, 4 May 2019. Picture: Bhekikhaya Mabaso / African News Agency (ANA)

How did the country get to a time where the only way to give a sense of security in schools was to place a police officer on the school grounds?

As a nation we must begrudgingly admit we have failed to rein our children in.

Pupils are holding schools under siege.

The schooling system is under siege, teachers are under attack, pupils are attacking each other, parents are physically fighting teachers and robbers are brazenly attacking schools.

The idea that the school yard is a place of safety is long gone – – and in comes the men and women in blue. This is government saying they can no longer be called to schools to bury pupils. What a sad state of affairs!

South African school children quite literally have nowhere to run. As parents, we have no assurance that once our children enter the gates, our children are in a safe environment.

We are indeed the generation of less. Looking at Youth Month and the calibre of the current youth and our socio-economic conditions, we are far from the achievers of yesteryear.

We have fallen short of the aspiration the youth of ’76 wanted us to become. These young men and women, who today are raising their own children, are forced to come to terms with the stark reality that we might have been given far too much, far too early.

While we deserved freedom, those who raised us were never prepared in administering the lesson that with every right comes responsibility.

We must be adult enough to admit we are fast becoming exactly what we hoped we would never become. Those we blamed for our hardships, those we believed put us at disadvantages, we are fast becoming them, leaving scores of children parentless as they are raised by grandparents trying to fill the parental void.

Parents must take responsibility for their children – government can only do so much.

We need to take back our classrooms and schools.

As parents, we must be held fully accountable for our children’s behaviours because who they are at school is a reflection of our control.