Parenting Challenges

Kenya is abuzz with an Oscar award to one of her own. It is justifiable as Africa has never had one of its own winning that. I hear she is the sixth negroid to win that award since its inception I don’t know when.

But my concern is different. I am a parent I have to raise children in these very confused times. I need to give them direction in the moral and spiritual to help them navigate these murky waters.

I saw a picture when she accepted the award (I normally do not watch TV) and was really saddened for the parents watching with their children. Why? She was in all pretexts naked as she had her whole chest exposed to the world. Simply speaking she could easily be labeled as naked as that chest is supposed to be part of her private parts.

I know many will label me retrogressive and I won’t dispute it. But I know very few men will take a girl thus dressed to present to his parents for a wife. Such women serve best to meet a man’s base instincts and the highest she could get is as a concubine.

How will a parent who is cheering this success story from Kenya tell his daughter should she request a dress that left her chest exposed like Lupita’s? How will that sane father be able to convince his daughter that Lupita is an excellent hypocrite, in fact the best of them all? For your information acting and drama is exactly that.

Isn’t this girl now a role model to many Kenyan girls? How will that dress be overlooked by impressionable girls?

You see we know that white women and girls dress badly, especially those in the pictures. It is therefore easy to disconnect our daughters from them by saying they have a different culture. What will we say about our own? What argument do we put to help our daughters avoid dressing like ‘our own’?

What will we tell our daughters when our girl starts behaving like the Hollywood crowd? How do we convince them that acting has its own down side, a side we know too well? What do we tell her admirers when, God forbid, she joins the moral decadence Hollywood is known for? Or is she an angel just because she comes from Kenya?

Does God have something to say about Hollywood? Apart from the money that seems to flow out of there, is there a positive thing that is known to come out of there?

Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places: (Numbers 33:52)

What is an image? What is a picture? Why was Israel ordered to destroy pictures from Canaan?

Does Hollywood offer anything positive to the youth apart from the careless dressing and sex scandals that seem to flow from there as a mighty river?

I was in a media school, in fact the only one for the region then. The film department (say Hollywood) trained people from all countries from Zimbabwe down South to Sudan in the North. I am therefore in a position of some understanding about the media, at least broadly.

I know the power of the media to impact society. But many times that power is used negatively as few people dare question someone they may never meet in life when he presents something they do not agree with or understand. Many assume that for someone to be heard on radio or seen on TV they are really the best there is. Some actually attach something close to divinity on a media personality. These are things I have seen as I also worked in a media house, the only one then.

It is no wonder that some of the most morally repulsive characters in society are media personalities, many times because some equate sex with such a person as a great blessing instead of a sin. Their corruption index is way up because they seem to attract gifts to their persons instead of looking for them.

Won’t it be better if we spent more time understanding Hollywood to help our youngsters appreciate that this new inspiration may have its downside? Won’t it be more positive if we explained our children what drama is so that they understand beyond what the media is saying?

Even better, won’t it be much better if we spent enough time in the word of God so that we use it to assess all this negative input? Then our children will be on a safe foundation.