Of the conventional social responsibilities and choices that we have to make as individuals, parenting seems to have been hit the hardest by issues of rights and legality. The result of this trend continues to place our so called rights above our response-ability to do right. A suitable analogy is the act of mortgaging our conscience at the expense of being legal. We cannot discipline our children today for fear of being accused of unfair treatment and abuse. Parents who should instinctively know the consequences of child neglect and abandonment need the law on the side of their helpless children to remind them of their responsibility.

There is hardly a doubt that the legal age act of eighteen started out to satisfy the need of making responsible men and women out of young adults by giving them adult privileges to serve man and country especially in times of war. This legal privilege has questionably become a legitimate severance of children from their parents, a phenomenon most welcome by both parties for a variety of reasons including financial freedom. Easily said; “once a parent, always a parent”. In my opinion, this privilege should be noticeable only in the respect accorded to an adult child by a parent as a result of the responsibility and accountability on the part of the child. Respect is better earned than negotiated. Sadly, some parents almost cannot wait to be relieved of the financial burden. Children on the other hand can hardly wait to be free from lectures on prudence. The result; both parties end up in the same market place school of money management after being taught some hard real life’s lessons. In times past, even uneducated parents have passed the survival tests of the worst post-war economies and still had a thing or two to teach the economics graduate. This is simply because they kept lives simple. Today, our clash of interest and purpose has erased the wisdom lines of age, respect and integrity.

So when teenagers, who should still be under parental supervision become moms and dads themselves, the pain of their indiscretion spreads like wild fire across every fiber of our society. It may be easier to look the other and ignore the unfortunate indiscretions of parents and children in our society who should know better. We may run, but we certainly cannot hide from the stray bullets from the guns of angry youth in our neighborhood that most times end up destroying the lives of the innocent. Unfortunately the flip side of these sought legalities has produced monster-like children and parents alike and we as our own spectators have become the inventors who are incapable of controlling our own invention. This very devastating scenario runs as far as four generations in some families, affirming that God’s reward for disobedience is generational.

The fact that we make our own rules and insist on them working out in our favor does not mean that there were no set rules before we got here. The truth is that whenever we lift boundaries in our quest for freedom, we lose everything including freedom itself. When teenagers, still under the supervision of their parents suddenly become parents, there can be no end to the pain and heartache caused by their indiscretion. When teen mothers murder or neglect their own children just to enjoy yet another moment of freedom, when young and mentally strained fathers turn the guns on their entire family because they cannot cope with the stress of fatherhood, when regular people like you and I, living in a supposedly free country do not feel safe enough to let our children loose even our front yard, maybe we will finally heed the wake-up call to a more realistic preference. Indeed, we should be morally right instead of being legally correct.