“While the 15 year old who goes to Church in the modern society may be instructed for an average of 20 minutes every week from the pulpit, and the one from a very good home may have the attention of his or her parents for an average of 15 minutes a day, (and that may be all the moral, religious and value instruction he or she ever gets), it is said that the same youth often spends up to 10 hours every day watching TV and browsing several internet sites, and taking in (often uncritically) whatever the TV and Internet platforms have to offer, including the good, the bad, and the ugly – from the dirty hardcore pornographic sites, to the frightening sites where young people are taught easy ways of killing people, or easy ways of committing suicide!”
These are excerpts of the Executive Director, Lux Terra Leadership Foundation, Rev. Fr. George Ehusani’s keynote address at the 46th Annual National Convention of the Ladies of St. Mulumba (LSM), Nigeria held last week in Abuja. Fr. Ehusani has expressed concerned at the digital vulnerability in young people and its effects of eroding parental and Church authority. According to the cleric, the traditional moral norms no longer hold sway in the life of many people in today’s world.
“The traditional agents of socialisation – the family, the Church and the school, have lost much of their authority and pride of place in the socialisation process,” he said. Fr. Ehusani further illustrated how the television and social media have created a celebrity-drive environment in which the children tend to fixate on famous movie stars and other entertainers and see them as their role model; a situation he described as “an ever-worsening sense of futility and the loss of meaning and purpose.”
