By Garba Sidi
Attitudes are fundamental to understanding social perceptions because they strongly influence our perception of people we meet, the people we live with, the groups we join or avoid, and colleagues in our various communities. In addition, attitudes are essential in organising information about other people. Thus, as we interact with different individuals, objects or situations from time to time and in different environments, we tend to form specific attitudes just as others form attitudes about us.
As psychologists said, our attitudes are formed firstly from family, society and schools. These three places are where children shape their attitudes, either negative or positive. Children will not pass without family, so that means the family is the first chain for shaping a child’s attitude. Whatever role the family play is how their children will grow and develop cognitively.
Family combine parents, sisters and brothers in nuclear family and grandfather, grandmother and uncles are included in the extended family. Each one of those members has a role to play in shaping a child attitude positively and negatively. Family is like a tree; any branch and leaf have a role in contributing to the survival of that tree. Failure of one branch or leaf will cause damage to the entire tree. That’s how the wrong role of one member will cause an unwanted attitude to the children of that family.
Sadly, nowadays family ignore their responsibility and substitute it with hatred, showing concerns to only biological sons and daughters. Even some parents leave their sons and daughters to live like sheep without shepherds. This careless behaviour that emerges today is hazardous, and it’s the central foundation of the problems we indulged in today.
Unfortunately, frustration is what leads the majority of children to form all these kinds of undesirable attitudes. Some children find themselves in a family full of challenges like hatred toward the mother by one’s stepmother, father not taking responsibility for his children, etc.
All these will lead a child to form unwanted behaviour after indulged in frustration. No doubt, our society is ravaged by kidnappers, sexual immorality, drunkenness and armed robbery. Children lack a sense of duty with lofty aspirations of becoming rich overnight to fulfil their needs. They engage in cultism and occultism, a fastest ritual way of getting rich and are subjected to unbearable pains and suffering.
May Allah save us, amin.
Garba Sidi can be reached at sidihadejia@yahoo.com.
