DECLINE OF MORAL VALUES AMONG TODAY'S YOUTHS

What are Morals?

They are acceptable standard of general conduct or behavior when judged by an average person or the society at large.

Morality is all about the appropriateness or goodness of what a person does, thinks, or feels.

DEVELOPMENT OF MORALS

Childhood is the time at which moral standards begin to develop in a process that often extends well into adulthood.

Understanding all forms of social awareness are important in the development of a child’s moral sense.

Some psychologists are of the theory that people's development of moral standards passes through stages that can be grouped into three moral levels.

(a) At the early level of pre-established moral reasoning, the child uses external and physical events (such as pleasure, pain or happenings around) as the source for decisions about moral rightness or wrongness; his standards are based strictly on what will avoid punishment or bring pleasure.

(b) At the intermediate level of established moral reasoning, the adolescent child views moral standards as a way of maintaining the approval of authority figures, chiefly his/her parents, and acts in accordance with their guideline or instruction.

Moral standards at this level are on a positive evaluation of authority, rather than on a simple fear of punishment.

(c) At the third level of post-established moral reasoning, the adult child bases his/her moral standards on principles (rules) that he/she has evaluated and accepted as naturally suitable, regardless of society's opinion.

He/She thinks that social standards and rules (morals) which he/she regards as relative rather than supreme in authority are subjective in nature.

The child who has now become an adult bases his/her justification of moral standards from avoidance of punishment to avoidance of public disapproval and rejection by the society at large.

His/her moral reasoning also increasingly moves toward greater social scale (i.e. people and institutions).

Therefore, as children mature or attain adulthood, they begin to describe themselves by how they feel, how they think, and what they believe rather than the society’s acceptable standard of behavior and etiquette.

MORAL INFLUENCES

Morals are influenced by family, society, culture and social values etc; the extents to which these values are kept or discarded depend on these influences.

The agents of education i.e. the family, school, church and the society are to play a role in ensuring that moral values are passed on to the child as he/she comes in contact with them.

The child fitting into the expected norms of the society depends on the way he/she has been brought up by his first point of contact (the parents) with the world.

Unfortunately, due to several social and economic factors, many families are disoriented, disorganized and confused and therefore have failed woefully to play this vital role.

CAUSES OF DECLINE

• Parents

Parental behavior affects the child's personality and the likelihood of developing moral deficiency.

The most important qualities in this regard are whether and how parents

communicate their love to the child, the disciplinary techniques they use, and their behavior as role models without relegating moral inculcation to the background.

Nowadays, educated and non educated parents alike are more concerned with their children's academic achievement than cultural, traditional and moral values.

These permissive parents tend to use less reasonable control over their children; they are lax in discipline and they make few demands on their children for better behavior and allowed them to regulate their own activities as much as possible.

•  Peer pressure

Sometime, the child comes to rely heavily on the peer group for support and guidance during a time when parental nagging about the child’s declining morality begins to be more pronounced.

The children of permissive parents often fall victim of peer pressure and since perhaps only others experiencing the same transition can be relied upon to understand what that experience is.

•         Effect of Divorce / Working Mothers

The major adverse impact of divorce on children is evident during the first year after the divorce and seems to be a bit more enduring for boys than for girls. Pre-school children seem to be most vulnerable to the effect of divorce and adolescents the least.

In most modern industrialized countries, the proportion of working mothers with children under 18 greatly increased in the last few decades of the 20th century, to the point that one-half of all mothers with children under 5 are in the workforce.

EFFECTS OF DECLINE ON YOUTHS

• It stunts development.
• Reduces self concept (a guiding principle that determines how a person is perceived).
• It promotes identity crisis and relationship with individuals or group who already perceived the association as morally deficient.
• Discussions at meetings or gatherings are usually aggressive and acts of belligerency are quite noticeable.

CONCLUSION

There is no doubt that youths are in a great dilemma today; they face enormous challenges.

The society is riddled with vices; religious leaders are also not laying good examples and establishing enduring legacies for young people.

Today, things are not what they use to be in terms of discipline, respect for elders and constituted authority, humility, hard work, honesty, faithfulness and love for others.

The youths of today have been ensnared by youthful lusts, pride, arrogance, disrespect, disobedience and indiscipline; these are traits that can only grow out of habits for ‘thoughts bring forth acts, acts produce habits, while habits become character’

Today young people lack moral values and youths are faced with the problem of who they really are; this can be frustrating as morals dictates our person and how we are perceived by the society at large.

In contrast, human beings are coherent wholes (undivided), and behavioral development is unified, so that development in any one area of life at any one time is ineluctably interrelated with development in other arenas at the same and at other times in patterns of mutual influence. 

In the course of life, genetic endowment and biology interact with cultural context and experience to shape the development of human behavior  Each of these powerful sources of influence on development has distinctive characteristics, and it is their transaction over time as well as the degree of congruence between the two that influence outcome.

Our elucidation of the processes that underpin human growth is central to understanding normal as well as abnormal development. The study of development of human behavior is unwieldy; life does not submit to elegant scientific analysis or to precise prediction as it were.

Therefore, developmental study takes as its goals the general description and explanation of origins, of constancy, and of change in perceiving, thinking, feeling, behaving and of course correction and arresting the decline of morals among youths.

Do you agree?  Well, reactions are welcome.