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Rapid social transformation driven by globalization, migration, economic pressures, technological advancement, and changing family structures is creating unprecedented challenges for parents across Nigeria and the wider African continent, speakers at the latest edition of The Toyin Falola Interviews have warned.
The issues came under scrutiny during Sunday’s Toyin Falola Interviews, where Professor Toyin Falola led a conversation on the future of parenting in a rapidly changing world. Joining him were Sarah Ogbonna, a healthcare professional and author based in Ireland; youth development advocate Jomiloju Connoisseur; commercial lawyer and author Okezi Uwede-Meshack; and Ibiba Odili, founder of the Phenomenal Strides Foundation.
Throughout the discussion, the panelists argued that parenting in the 21st century has become significantly more complex than it was for previous generations, as parents struggle to raise children amid rapidly evolving social realities.
Professor Falola opened the discussion by highlighting the growing gap between traditional parenting approaches and the demands of contemporary society.
Reflecting on his travels and observations across different countries, the historian pointed to economic hardship, migration, and changing value systems as some of the forces shaping modern family life.
He recounted encounters with undocumented migrants in Europe and linked many social problems to broader questions of parental responsibility and societal change.
“Whether you like it or not, these are cases of parenting, parental failure, adult responsibilities and the likes,” he said.
Falola argued that worsening economic conditions have made parenting more difficult for many families. “As the Nigerian economy and African economy decline, you can’t ask people to be defending their dignity if they can’t put food on their tables. What dignity are they defending if an adult can’t feed himself or herself?” he asked.
The scholar also pointed to changing career landscapes that many parents struggle to understand.
“In every five years, a new occupation emerges,” he said. “Part of what we have to do on the African side is also that parenting capacity for knowledge systems can be limited.”
According to him, many parents are now confronted with situations where their children possess greater knowledge about emerging careers and technologies than they do. “We are now having situations in which the younger person can actually know better than the parents,” he observed.
The changing nature of work, he argued, requires parents to become lifelong learners rather than relying solely on the experiences that shaped previous generations.
For Ibiba Odili, one of the most significant social changes affecting parenting is the decline of Africa’s traditional support systems. Reflecting on her childhood, she described a period when grandparents, relatives, and members of the extended family played active roles in raising children.
“From home I watched my mom, a single parent, single-handedly raise her five biological children and some from our extended family,” she recalled. “In the midst of my mother’s struggles was my grandmother co-parenting and providing support for the household.”
According to her, the support provided by the extended family system was critical to raising children successfully. “The presence of grandparents and aunties were common in homes in those days. A lesson I learnt early in life is that parents need support, which is majorly missing in today’s parenting.”
Odili described the weakening of that support structure as one of the major challenges confronting modern families. “The erosion of the African extended family support system, which provided stability and cohesion,” she said, has left many parents carrying responsibilities that were once shared by entire communities.
She also pointed to other pressures affecting families, including poverty, social vices, and changing social values. “I grew up in a hotspot environment in Lagos in the 60s and 70s where drugs, violence, prostitution, gangs, poverty and other social vices were quite prominent,” she said.
Yet despite those difficulties, she recalled that her mother and grandmother constantly reinforced positive values.“They always reminded us that yes, we live here, but we also have a choice not to be products of our society.”
Sarah Ogbonna approached the issue from the perspective of migration and cultural adjustment, drawing on her experiences raising children in Ireland after beginning her parenting journey in Nigeria.
She explained that immigrant parents face the difficult task of preserving their cultural values while helping their children adapt to new environments.
“In my journey as a parent, having raised children in Nigeria and also coming to Ireland, the first thing I noticed is the individualism in European society,” she said.
One of her earliest challenges, she recalled, involved helping her children navigate differences in cultural expectations.
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“When my children started school here, they would call their teachers aunty, and their teachers would sternly turn around and say, ‘Don’t call me aunty, I am not your aunty. My name is Susan or my name is Helen.’”
The experience forced her to rethink how she would preserve cultural values while helping her children integrate into a different society.
“That’s when I had to quickly start to ask myself, how can I do this, and how best can I not lose my children?”
Ogbonna stressed that modern parenting requires intentionality and consistency.
“We need and have to be intentional,” she said.
“If we talk about eroding our Africanness as a result of globalization, it starts from home. So we have to start from inside out.”
For Okezi Uwede-Meshack, a millennial father, the challenge lies in raising children in a world that is radically different from the one in which many parents grew up.
“The other interesting aspect of our cultural move was how, as millennials, we witnessed a world without phones and with phones,” he said.
He noted that many parents are caught between traditional methods of child-rearing and modern realities.
“While we want our children to go outside to play because that was what we had, we also understand there are phones and now the digital world that they can make use of.”
He pointed out that family structures themselves have changed.
“While our parents were privileged to have longer omugwo periods in our time, our parents are still working. They usually are not able to fully be with us for five months, six months.”
The result, he said, is that many parents now rely on technology and online resources for support that previous generations received from family members.
“Social media has so much information that helps to navigate some of the things that our parents could have taught us,” he observed.
However, he warned that this shift also creates new anxieties.
“Now there is social media everywhere that’s pushing ideas to them,” he said.
“My major goal in life is always to be the first to teach my child something before they see it online.”
Young advocate Jomiloju Connoisseur argued that these changes are already affecting how young people relate to parents, culture, and society.
“Parenting is declining, growing up is declining due to various situations that surround the world today, most especially in a country like Nigeria,” he said.
According to him, economic pressures and technological change have altered traditional family relationships.
“It brings questions of how to relate with one’s parents, what to relate with one’s parents, when to relate with one’s parents, which have been eroded to a large extent.”
He warned that while technology offers opportunities, it also presents significant risks.
“Technology, they say, is the biggest and best thing that has happened to us in Africa, but it is no news that even some of the greatest advantages and development pose a great threat in our society.”
