10 Frequent Parent Fails Happening Here and Now with Tragic Results for Kids

This story got my ire today.

I decided to write this post because I am just sick and tired of reading about a child’s body being fished out of a river or seeing their limp, lifeless bodies looking like road-kill on the scene of a crash accident.

Forgive me if my tone is a little harsher and more judgemental than you are are used to. I apologise for my bluntness.  I need to send an explicit message.

I can’t catch the predator (although I pray the police will soon), but I surely hope to catch the attention of some delinquent parents.

If you’re reading this and you’re guilty of these 10 insanely stupid parenting failures,  I’m saying to you now– Stop! For whether you are aware of it or not, if you’ve lost a child due to these failures as a parent or if you have children and are failing to care for them, you are about to become accomplices to the natural death or God forbid, murder of your child.

Stop ‘killing’ your children because you are too stupid, too distracted, too lazy, too busy or too selfish to care for and protect them. You are a Parent Fail Nominee if you’re doing any of these.

1. Dawn damnation. Stop sending your children out of your home unaccompanied at the brush of dawn to get their own taxis and buses to school. Take them there. Get your lazy butt out of that bed, get them breakfast, get them dressed, pack their bags, take them to the bus stop if you don’t drive and wait with them there. Take them to school and hand them over to the teacher, then you can go back home and  sleep off your late night party or graveyard shift (yes, I know about the single mom/dad life). A seven year old child who just perished this weekend would still be alive today if her parent or guardians had followed this rule. There are some parents who stop seeing their kids as kids once they lose their cute chubby cheeks and start use a potty. Some of you have kids who are so saucy you think they are big people. Well listen here, because your kid behaves like Aunty Acid doesn’t mean that they can protect themselves against the world. They are small. They cannot fight off a brawny man. A six, seven or eight year old is still a baby. Not a teenager. Not an adult. Be the adult and protect them.

2. Rumming the Milk. Stop giving your babies and kids a swig of your beer or puff of your cigarette or ganja spliff. It’s not funny. You are an idiot if you think it is. Alcohol and drugs rots your brain. If it does that to adults, what will it do to your kid? So while you’re passing jokes with your bredren or sistren about how you got your kid to sleep all day by putting some rum in his milk, and while you are busy giving him his first taste of hard liquor, start putting up bail money and book rehab space from now, ’cause if you keep that up, that’s where your child is heading. And don’t even bother to whip him when he can’t say his abcs or write his name when all the other kids in his class are progressing and he has to repeat dunce class for the third time. Because you’ve done killed off a million of his brain cells with your stupidity.

3. Open death traps. Stop leaving those open wells and catchment tanks with water open for your kids to fall in. You lady, crying on tv as your dead child is being thrown into the back of a hearse, your kid didn’t just fall in. You virtually pushed him in there. When you’re going to leave an open tank in your yard for weeks and months and do nothing to cover it. . .

It’s not like you haven’t heard the news of children falling into these death traps. You heard them, but you chose to ignore them, just as how you chose to close the back door and chose to ignore your kids playing too close to the edge, as you were too busy texting, chatting or surfing, and you thought he was too smart to know not to crawl too close ? Say what? ‘Cause your kid didn’t come with a healthy dose of curiosity and would would want to check out his ripply reflection in a watery pond like any other kid. So you leave your child unattended and he falls into his death sentence you created by your carelessness for him. Do you think you are innocent of your child’s death? No, ma’am. You just as good as pushed him in there. I hope it lives on your conscience forever. Get it. You can’t be a parent and not constantly thinking about your kids. You don’t have that option. Ever.

4. Stop driving with your kids unstrapped. I saw a taxi driver the other day with his toddler in the back seat — child could not be more than a year old –alone in the back while he’s picking up passengers. So his child was there sitting behind his seat, sitting at the edge of the seat, and at any moment if he braked suddenly, could fly through the half-open window of the door he’s seated beside or into the back of the driver’s seat or worse through the wind screen were another vehicle to back-end him. I spoke to him about it, and he tells me the child is fine and in no danger. It ‘s something he does all the time. Yet just a month earlier, another child seated in her mother’s lap had met her fatal end when the taxi they were travelling in crashed and sent the child through the window. She died before she even touched the soft earth outside. Why? Because of parents who don’t follow the rules, rules which are there to safeguard themselves and their children.

5. Fire fools. Stop running to the shop for a minute, going out to party or church all night. Stop leaving them with a reputed careless ‘puppa’; stop falling asleep leaving the matches, lamp or candle within arms reach of your children and your nylon curtains. Have you been Snow White and in a coma all your life that you never heard that  the beauty of a flame is temptation children can’t resist? So why, why, why when you locked that door and the minute at the shop stretched to 30 minutes or you were gyrating on your head at that all night party didn’t you think that they could be incinerated by the time you got back; because it has happened over and over and you’ve heard not to do it, but in your vegetated state, you wanted them to die painfully so you could relieve yourself of the burden of bothering with them? Is that it? Now your fake crocodile tears are played out across the media. Who do you think you are fooling?  It should be a crime for parents like you to have kids.

6. Babysitters from hell.  You’re in line for an Idiocy award if you have been leaving your children in day care centers or stranger’s homes when all the signs tells you that it’s a risk. Or have no evidence at all, because you failed to check out who these people are, their backgrounds, whether there is a predator there, what they watch on their cable station. You’ve been so gullible to believe the smiling face of that friendly neighbour, church brother or sister means they are trustworthy. How many children have been molested or abused that way?  How many of you are leaving your babies in day care centres that have every sign in the manual that they are neglectful, unhygienic and staff is uncaring, and you still leave your children there, because you can’t be bothered or just can’t afford anything better? I saw a very disturbing video on Facebook some time ago in which a nine year old boy (about 10 or so) waas caught on surveillance camera mauling children in a day care centre in the States. The Daily Mail carried the story. Here is the video.

Surveillance cameras are good things in places like these to help show up childcarers abuse, but does your ‘friend’ have one in his home?  Do you really know your child’s ‘babysitters’? Are you ignoring the physical signs of abuse?

Listen to the advice of this doctor in this next disturbing nanny cam abuse video.

7. Stop calling your child a liar when he tells you that Uncle Bobby put his thing in her mouth or touch her there. If your three year old tells you and shows you inappropriate actions that were done to her, why wouldn’t you believe? Unless you have been having sex in front of him/her since she was born and she knows everything about sex so that her little imagination could concoct such as detailed story. Stop denying what is in front of you. Listen and investigate. Children rarely lie about their molestation. Take him or her to the doctor and see if there is any evidence, although do not be quick to say it’s a lie because the child’s hymen is intact. Really smart molesters know how to be hide their shenanigans when ‘handling’ young children. Women, leave the man, report the molestation to the Office of Children’s Advocate, and don’t let family and neighbours tell you otherwise. Sexual abuse is a death sentence for a child the minute it happens. As the parent, you’re pushing that knife deeper in the wound after he/she tells you of the horror and you side with the predator and victimise the victim, your own child. You shall account to God for it. Believe me.

8. Children running things. Stop allowing your children to be laws unto themselves and running your home. Put curfews in your home. Why is your child coming home from school at 7 p.m. when classes ended at 2:30 or 4:00 p.m. if he had extra classes. What is he or she doing that is keeping her out so late? Have you investigated? Do you even know what time the child gets home?Are you or anyone even at home when he or she gets there? Take your head out of the sand and do some detective work if you have to to learn where your child is spending his evenings and why he or she is coming home so late? Go to the school. Visit the bus stop. Observe, ask questions and learn your child’s patterns. Know the friends they’re hanging with. Too many kids are going missing and many of these cases are happening after hours. Child trafficking is a reality in this country. If you don’t paying attention your kid could end up as a sex slave in Russia or be found dead in a field.

9. Too many smart devices unsmart. Stop giving your kids smart devices and start monitoring what they are doing on social media. Did you see a recent Youtube video on Facebook where a mother found out that her 12 year old daughter had been posting nude videos of her self on the net for men? Many of you denounced the almost one hour of whipping she gave the child on Youtube. But can we understand that mother’s disappointment that her child would do that? More and more stories about high school students having sex with grown men have been popping up on Youtube and in the tabloids. Kids  are engaging in sexting and chat rooms with people who are not what their gravatars or photos say they are. If you have a preteen or teen in the house, it’s time you started checking what he or she is doing on social media. Which chat rooms has he or she visited? If your child is engaging in unsafe social media behaviour, there are a number of safeguards and monitors that parents can put in place, among them password codes and tracking apps for phones and internet sites. Some parents are replacing their kids smart phones with basic phones. Set rules. Demand that devices be turned in to you at bed time. See my last post in which I cite a Huffington Post article listing all the ways that too much screen time is making your kids sick. Monitor and apply limits. It could extend your child’s life. 

10. Children as sympathy baits. Stop begging on the streets and using your children as sympathy baits. I’m seeing it too often: fathers and mother with babies on the breast and a litter of children around their legs way after these children’s bed times on the streets begging for money. And it’s not an occasional thing. It has become a practice, and the parents have made it their job to have their kids approach strangers on plazas while they work on another ‘ends’ telling sob stories and coaching their children to put on their hungriest faces.

O I do know there are real cases of parents who have nothing for their children to eat, and I’ll give to these, but I pass back four hours later and you’re still at the location, in the cold, some kids sleeping on your legs, begging more. And you’re there every Friday for months. No no no. If you want to beg you beg. But leave the children at home. Or beg in the day and take your children home at nights. Why should you punish your children in that fashion and teach them that it’s okay to be poor and be a beggar. What lessons are you teaching your children when they see your craftiness in obtaining money? It’s just a matter of time before your son or daughter is snatched by a predator and that is the end of his life. All because you have found it more convenient to beg than to go work in a fast food joint or clean a house to earn an income to feed your children. Mothers, fathers, time to stop.

Save your children from becoming the next roadkill. Stop destroying and killing them. Protect them.