THERE was a time when a child did not belong only to his parents; the whole community raised the child. If you misbehaved on your street, the neighbour, gateman, the aunty who had no biological relationship with you somehow knew and was fully qualified to report your crime before you got home, or even punish and correct you without anyone raising an eyebrow.
In many Nigerian communities, especially the old neighbourhoods where everybody knew everybody, your parents did not need to be physically present for you to know that someone was watching. The woman selling akara at the junction knew you, the neighbour knew you, the elderly man sitting outside knew you, and sometimes even the gateman knew exactly which kind of trouble you were capable of getting into. There was always somebody watching, somebody noticing and somebody ready to say, “Wait until your mother hears about this.”
And when you finally arrived home, there was usually a second round waiting for you. That was the village. It was not perfect, far from it. Sometimes the village was intrusive, unnecessarily nosy and capable of knowing things about your family that you never told them. Sometimes people crossed boundaries, gossiped about families and inserted themselves into matters that did not concern them.
But it also watched, noticed, corrected and protected. There was an informal social responsibility that meant children understood that their behaviour had consequences beyond the four walls of their homes. You were not simply your parents’ child; you were somebody’s neighbour’s child, somebody’s nephew, somebody’s younger brother, somebody’s responsibility.
Today, we have replaced that village with something far more powerful, which is the internet. And unlike our old village, the internet does not sleep. It does not go home at sunset. It does not become tired. It does not say, “We will continue tomorrow.” It follows our children into the bedroom, into the sitting room, into the school bus, into the classroom, into the toilet and sometimes even onto the dining table. The old village had eyes and ears; the new village has algorithms, artificial intelligence, billions of pieces of content and an almost unlimited ability to learn what attracts our children’s attention and keep serving them more of it.
We are raising children in a world where a toddler can be handed a smartphone because mummy needs some me time, daddy needs to watch his favourite match, or quite frankly, everybody just needs five minutes of peace. So we put a cartoon on and the child sits quietly. Problem solved. Except the problem has only been postponed because eventually, the cartoon becomes YouTube, YouTube becomes YouTube Shorts, then TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram.
Then whatever new platform arrives tomorrow. What began as an innocent attempt to keep a child occupied can gradually become a habit, and that habit can become an attachment that parents may not even realise is developing until taking the phone away suddenly feels like declaring war.
Before we know it, the little child who once needed us to choose his cartoons is old enough to choose what he watches himself. And we congratulate ourselves because he is always at home. But is he really? A child can be physically sitting beside you in the living room while mentally travelling through places you have never seen, conversations you know nothing about and content you would never willingly allow into your home. He may be sitting on the same sofa with you, but his attention is somewhere else entirely. You can hear the laughter coming from the phone without knowing what caused it, and you can see the screen glowing without necessarily understanding what is happening behind it.
That is the frightening part. We worry about the stranger outside the gate, but we have given the stranger a password to enter through the screen. We worry about who our children are playing with outside, yet we hand a teenager a smartphone with unrestricted internet access and assume that because the door is locked, our child is safe. Safe from what exactly? From pornography?
Violent content, dangerous challenges, strangers, predatory adults? From hate, unhealthy body standards, influencers teaching them that wealth, beauty, sex and popularity are the ultimate measures of human worth? We have become so focused on keeping physical danger outside our gates that we sometimes forget that the digital world does not need to knock before entering.
Have we actually checked what is on that phone, or have we simply checked that the battery is charged? The things children can stumble upon today are frightening. And even when we do, do we realise just how smart these children are? The Nigerian child of today is growing up in a digital environment that many of us, as parents, did not experience at their age. Some children understand applications, devices, platforms and online tricks with an ease that leaves their parents struggling to keep up. They know things about technology that their parents may only discover after something has already gone wrong.
We install parental controls, check their phones occasionally and block certain websites. We restrict certain apps and convince ourselves that we have done our part. But children are clever. Very clever. Some of them know their way around technology better than we do. They know how to clear search histories, hide applications, create secret accounts, switch between platforms, use browsers we do not know about and find ways around restrictions we thought were foolproof. A child can be sitting right in front of you, looking completely innocent, while knowing ten different ways to get around the parental controls you proudly installed yesterday.
So yes, check the phone. Set boundaries. Use parental controls. But let’s not fool ourselves into believing that a password or an app restriction is a substitute for parenting. Technology can help us supervise, but it cannot take over the responsibility of raising a child. Because if your child’s safety depends entirely on technology being smarter than your child, you have already lost the argument.
The real protection is not simply knowing what is on the phone. It is knowing who your child is becoming. That is the harder part of parenting because it requires time, attention, patience and uncomfortable conversations. It requires us to know what our children fear, what they admire, what they secretly desire, what makes them insecure, who their friends are, who their heroes are and what kind of person they are trying to become. It requires more than checking a screen. It requires knowing the person behind the screen.
A teenager can type one innocent question into a search engine and be introduced to material that parents of our generation would have considered completely unimaginable for a child. TikTok can serve one harmless-looking video, and the algorithm can decide what comes next. Instagram can turn curiosity into a rabbit hole. And Snapchat — the hypocrite of an app that can preach community guidelines with one hand while serving you content you never asked for with the other, can expose young minds to things they may not yet have the maturity to process. AI has now entered the room.
Our children can ask machines questions they may be too embarrassed to ask their parents. They can get explanations without context, answers without wisdom and information without the moral compass that should accompany it. They can ask artificial intelligence about relationships, sex, depression, money, violence, religion, identity, schoolwork and practically anything else, often without a parent ever knowing that the conversation happened. And the machine may provide an answer, but it cannot replace the wisdom, experience, values and responsibility of a parent who understands that information is not the same thing as guidance.
Let me be clear: technology itself is not the enemy. Our abdication of responsibility is. We have gradually outsourced the difficult parts of parenting. “Let the cartoon keep him busy.” “Give her the phone; she won’t disturb anybody.” “Let him play his game.” “She is old enough to know what she is doing.” “AI can help him with the assignment.” And somewhere between convenience and exhaustion, we forgot that children are not self-raising; they are absorbing everything. They absorb what they see, what they hear, what we say, what we do, what we tolerate and what we ignore.
Children don’t simply consume content. Content consumes them too. And the saddest part is that we are sometimes more concerned about whether our children have the latest gadgets than whether they have developed the ability to live without them. We celebrate the expensive phone, the latest tablet, the newest gaming console and the fastest internet connection, but how often do we celebrate a child who can sit quietly and think? How often do we celebrate a child who reads? A child who plays outside? A child who can talk to people without checking a screen every thirty seconds?
Can they sit quietly without demanding a screen? Can they read a book without pictures flashing every three seconds? Can they play outside? Can they have a conversation with an adult? Can they entertain themselves? Can they hear the word “no” without behaving as if civilisation has collapsed? Can they distinguish between what is popular and what is right? These are not technological questions; they are parenting questions. They are questions about character, discipline, emotional intelligence, patience, resilience and the ability to function in the real world when the internet is unavailable.
I sometimes wonder what happened to the Nigerian aunty — not the one who wants to know when you are getting married. The other one. The aunty who could see your child doing something wrong from three houses away and somehow felt personally responsible for correcting it. What happened to the neighbour who could tell your mother, “Your son has been fighting outside”? What happened to the uncle who would ask, “Who taught you that word?” Those people may sometimes have been too intrusive, but they also represented something we have lost: a community that understood that raising children was not exclusively a private family affair.
We have dropped the legendary phrase, “It takes a village to raise a child,” and now, in the name of privacy and convenience, we have isolated children inside houses and connected them to the entire world. We removed the village, then we installed Wi-Fi. And somehow, we are shocked when the internet begins raising them. We took away the human beings who used to watch over our children and replaced them with devices that never sleep, platforms whose business models are built around attention and algorithms designed to keep users scrolling.
Maybe the question we should be asking is not whether our children are spending too much time online. It is whether we are spending enough time with them offline. Because no parental-control app can replace a conversation and no cartoon can replace a parent. No algorithm knows your child the way you should. And no artificial intelligence, no matter how intelligent, can love your child enough to take responsibility for who that child eventually becomes.
The internet can educate your child. AI can assist your child. Cartoons can entertain your child. But none of them should be raising your child. That job still belongs to us. It belongs to parents, families and, yes, perhaps even to the wider community we once called the village. We may never be able to return completely to the Nigeria of our childhood, and perhaps we should not. Technology has brought tremendous opportunities, education, communication and possibilities that previous generations could not imagine. But we must learn to use technology without surrendering our responsibility to it.
Because one day, the screen will go off. The Wi-Fi will disappear. The child will become an adult. And when that happens, we will finally meet the person we either raised… or the person we outsourced.
- Kabara is a writer and public commentator. Her syndicated column, Voice, appears in News Point Nigeria newspaper on Monday. She can be reached at hafceekay01@gmail.com.