Alfred Ajayi
Across many African communities, the traditional culture of communal parenting — where neighbours, relatives, teachers and elders collectively supervised and disciplined children — is steadily fading under the pressures of urbanisation, migration and modern individualistic lifestyles.
While many adults remember growing up in environments where “every child belonged to the community,” today’s parents increasingly see child discipline as a private responsibility, with outsiders often afraid to intervene.
As concerns grow over weakening family bonds, excessive screen exposure and rising antisocial behaviour among youths, parents, educators and scholars shared with Correspondent Alfred Ajayi their views on how African societies can preserve the accountability and social support of communal parenting without reviving the excesses of harsh traditional discipline.
For Mr Joshua Njimaezi, childhood in Eziobodo, Owerri West Local Government Area of Imo State came with many parents. Not biological parents alone, but neighbours, teachers, relations, church elders and virtually every adult in the community who believed correcting a child was a shared responsibility.
Growing up in the village, Njimaezi said children feared not only their fathers and mothers, but the entire community. “Community parenting was what we enjoyed,” he recalled. “You were careful because any adult could correct you if you misbehaved.”
In those days, he said, discipline travelled quickly. If a child was caught doing something wrong on the road, in the market or on the farm, the nearest adult could step in immediately. Nobody waited to ask permission from parents.
Njimaezi recounted a personal experience. “One afternoon as a primary school pupil, I followed some classmates to a farmland after school without informing my parents.
“One of my father’s friends spotted us deep in the bush. The man cut a cane, chased us, caught us and flogged us,” he recalled with a laugh.
Punishment continued at home
But the punishment did not end there. After disciplining him, the man placed him on a bicycle and rode him home, where he reported everything to Njimaezi’s father.
“My father continued from where the man stopped beating me. He asked me what I was doing in the bush at that time instead of being home after school.”
For him, that moment reflected the parenting structure that shaped many African communities for generations — a system where raising children was seen as everybody’s responsibility.
Looking back today, he regretted that things have changed dramatically. “Parents now resist correction from outsiders, even teachers,” he said.
Across many African societies, stories like Njimaezi’s are becoming increasingly familiar as traditional communal parenting gradually gives way to a more individualistic style of raising children.
For decades, African parenting revolved around the belief that “a child belongs to the community.” Studies on African family structures show that child-rearing in many traditional societies was deeply collective, involving grandparents, extended family members, neighbours and community elders.
Today, many families live behind fences, inside flats or gated estates where neighbours barely know one another. Parents increasingly see discipline as a private matter, while outsiders often avoid interfering for fear of conflict or even police involvement.
Researchers say the shift is not unique to Nigeria alone. Across Africa, rapid urban growth and the decline of traditional communal living are reshaping family systems. Modern urban lifestyles are gradually weakening those social support systems and replacing them with more nuclear and individualistic forms of parenting.
Yearning parenting differences
For Mrs Chigozie Chukwuleta, a staff of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State, the difference between then and now is impossible to ignore.
Raised by trader parents who were often away from home, Chukwuleta said the community itself became a watchful guardian over children.
“I dared not misbehave because I knew any mother, father or elder around could punish me before my parents even returned home,” she said.
Children, she recalled, constantly scanned their surroundings before attempting anything wrong. “You would hear your friends whisper, ‘Mama Ngozi is around.’ Immediately everybody would behave themselves.”
According to her, discipline was reinforced by collective moral standards where adults trusted one another’s judgment. “If somebody corrected you and your parents came back and you reported, the first thing they asked was – What did you do?
“Parents rarely challenged the adult who disciplined their child. Sometimes your parents would even continue the punishment,” she added.
Today, she regretted that many adults are afraid of correcting children who are not biologically theirs. “The child will tell you, ‘I will report you to my mother,’ because he/she knows that the mother will come and fight you,” she said.
In Chukwuleta’s view, one of the biggest casualties of modern parenting is accountability. “Many parents now avoid discipline entirely, choosing instead to pacify children with phones, snacks and unrestricted freedom.
“You go to houses now and everybody is holding phones because parents don’t want children disturbing them. Excessive dependence on screens and reduced parental supervision are weakening family bonds.
Yet she admitted that some aspects of old-fashioned parenting were excessive and should not return in the same form. “What we need is balance. We should go back to the drawing board and take the good values from how we were raised.”
Filling critical vacuum
An educator from Kaduna State, Mrs Binam Wakili remembers how neighbours once naturally stepped into parental roles during difficult moments.
“As a young student preparing to write JAMB, I approached my father for transport fare and feeding money. Instead, he shouted at me, saying he had no money.
“Disappointed and hurt, I left home in tears with only the little my mother could provide.”
Unknown to her, a neighbour had overheard the exchange between her and the father. “As I was walking away crying, the woman rushed out from her bathroom with soap still on her body and wrapper tied around her chest. She called me back and squeezed money into my hand,” Wakili recalled.
That gesture left a permanent impression on her. “That was the kind of community we had. People cared about your child as if the child belonged to everybody.”
“But, modern civilisation is gradually dismantling those values. I don’t think it is helping us much. It is rather separating us.”
“Today, people can live in the same neighbourhood for years without meaningful interaction. You may not even know your neighbour until somebody dies,” she regretted.
From collaboration to individualism
A Mass Communication scholar, Dr Henry Duru submitted that both parenting approaches reflective of the societies that produced them. “The parenting we had then reflected communal African living, while modern parenting reflects today’s individualistic society,” he explained.
According to him, communal parenting succeeded because communities themselves were tightly connected. “People knew children beyond their own homes,” he said. “Someone could see you in another street and immediately identify whose child you were – he says, that’s Okafor’s son.”
That environment he argued created multiple layers of accountability around children. “If a child was becoming wayward, neighbours, landlords and relatives stepped in immediately,” Duru recounted.
“I was recently speaking with a parent whose 16-year-old teenage daughter constantly challenged her authority. I asked her, ‘How did you raise her?’ and she smiled sadly because she knew the source of the problem.
“Such behaviour might have been difficult to sustain in older communal settings where several adults collectively monitored children. Back then, people around would not watch your child disrespect you. They would intervene.”
Duru contended that the decline of communal parenting has contributed to growing social indifference. “Everybody now minds their business and things spoil.”
“You now see increasing cases of teenage smoking, bullying and antisocial behaviour that often go unchecked because neighbours no longer interfere.
“In those days, even landlords disciplined children. Sometimes we feared them more than our own parents.”
Today, people are afraid of talking to another person’s child because they don’t want trouble,” he said.
Duru also pointed to modern housing patterns as part of the problem. “Flats and duplexes isolate people,” he said. “Unlike the old ‘face-me-I-face-you’ compounds, many people barely interact with neighbours anymore.”
As African cities continue expanding, many sociologists say parenting itself is changing alongside the physical environment.
Traditional compounds once encouraged shared supervision, where children played openly under the eyes of multiple adults. Modern urban life, however, increasingly confines families to private spaces with limited interaction outside immediate relatives.
Child rights conversation
At the same time, conversations around children’s rights have grown stronger as many parents now reject corporal punishment entirely. They argue that some traditional disciplinary practices crossed into abuse.
That tension sits at the centre of an evolving debate across Africa on how to preserve community values without violating children’s rights.
Some experts argue that while communal parenting encouraged accountability and social bonding, it also sometimes enabled excessive punishment and suppressed individuality.
Others insist that modern parenting has gone too far in isolating families and weakening social responsibility.
For many parents, teachers and scholars, the real challenge may not be choosing between the past and the present, but finding ways to combine the strengths of both.
Across many African communities, that sentiment continues to echo — not necessarily as a call to return fully to the past, but as a longing for a time when communities felt more connected, children were everybody’s concern and parenting did not feel like a cross being borne alone.
Featured image is AI-generated
Alfred Ajayi is a development journalist with the Federal Radio Corporation of the Nigeria
