Kristen Gyles | The role model phenomenon

“Who is your role model?”

Is it Barack Obama? Mahatma Gandhi? Or L.A. Lewis? We ask kids this question until they are old enough to resent it, almost expecting that they will pinpoint some notable public figure in society and laud them for … really just being popular, if we’re honest. That will not be the primary point of this article, though.

Parents, especially, need to become careful not to emphasise people over principles. As time progresses, more and more politicians, pastors, entertainers and other public figures alike are called out for wrongdoing. I had a conversation recently where a friend of mine lamented the idea that there are seemingly few stainless public figures that children can look up to nowadays. Others share the same grief.

It is unfortunate that in order for parents to point to noble and blameless characters as examples for their children, they have to either revert to made-up stories or history lessons about mysterious legends who died hundreds of years ago on the other side of the planet. But that should not be necessary. Hopefully, principles – and not people – will become the yardstick by which we start teaching our children to judge themselves.

We teach children to look up to all sorts of public figures for guidance, and when the reputations of these role models are smeared by some scandal or another, we try our best attempt at damage control. This could involve a long, wordy and circular trip around the mulberry bush where we try to excuse the situation or we throw the person under the bus entirely by denouncing them as having been a fake all along. The truth is, nobody is perfect and hardly anyone will live a life in which they never at any point miss the mark, so once a child’s moral compass is aligned to what any select entertainer or politician does, they are bound to, at some point, be misled.

BILL COSBY AND R KELLY

When ‘America’s Dad’, Bill Cosby, suddenly became the subject of a number of sexual assault allegations, many were heartbroken. How dare he not be the imaginary perfect family man we all thought? ‘R Kelly’ is another story altogether. Oh brother.

What is sad is that even in some cases where parents are around, the children have more faith in the ‘cake soap boss’ than in their parents’ own judgement. And at the risk of sounding critical, parents need to look into that. Something is seriously off when a child has to revert to the latest song released by ‘uncle demon’ for advice on conflict resolution. (Such advice is typically something along the lines of “kill and destroy”, but that’s beside the point.)

Just a few years ago, there was a big scare surrounding a new trend where young people were burning their birth certificates and doing all sorts of other ‘dunce’ things in order to identify as being ‘dunce and boasy’ or ‘fully dunce’, as was claimed by an artiste. Why do some children gravitate towards the stupidest of trends and seem unwilling to use their own brains, while others don’t?

Parenting is an action word. A good place for the action to start is with getting the children out of the frame of mind of following famous people – no matter who they are! I’ll go even further. Parents should get their children out of the frame of mind that they themselves as parents are perfect exemplars, too. Hopefully, the upcoming generation will learn not necessarily to pick role models to follow but instead to pick sound principles to live by. But they will have to be taught. Many children seem to be growing with no real sense of moral direction because they are looking to so-called ‘role models’ whose moral codes and standards of behaviour are ever-changing.

All this does not mean leaders should not be held to account for their actions. We all should. Laws are and should be in place to prevent the shameless disregard for principle. But, regardless of the number of laws in place, the corruption epidemic creates a ‘one law for the goose and none for the gander’ situation. Here is the reality we don’t want to face: the same celebrities our children look up to are the least likely to actually face punishment when they slip. And so they slip today, slip tomorrow, and keep sliding further and further down the slippery slope of reputational damage, all while remaining in full view of impressionable minds.

Despite the fallibility of mankind and, by extension, our leaders, parents are not sitting ducks in the matter of childrearing. Parents can start eroding the negative effects of the role model phenomenon by emphasising principles rather than people. People will mess up every now and again, and even when they don’t by one standard, they will by another. Get the children to understand that. Our children are intelligent and they can think, but we have to let them know that they can.

Kristen Gyles is a graduate student at the University of the West Indies, Mona Email feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com.