Who Is Raising Our Children? The Slow Death of Family Values in Nigeria

Once Upon a Time, We Knew Who Our Father Was.

Let me start with something that would have been too obvious to say twenty years ago but apparently needs to be said loudly in 2026.

A child needs a mother and a father. Not as a religious slogan. Not as a political talking point. As a basic developmental fact that every culture on earth figured out long before Instagram existed.

Nigeria understood this once. Nigeria built entire value systems around it. The extended family. The village. The elders. The aunties who corrected you even when your parents were not looking. The uncles who showed up when a young man was going in the wrong direction. The community that took collective responsibility for raising every child within it.

Ọmọ tí a kò bá kọ́ yóò ta ilé wa lábẹ́ wa. The child we fail to train will sell our house from under us.

That Nigeria is not entirely gone. But it is under serious, sustained and largely unacknowledged attack. And the attackers are not coming from outside. They are coming from within. From our phones. From our timelines. From our own choices that we dress up as freedom and modernity while the consequences grow up around us.

The Baby Mama Economy: When a Child Becomes a Lifestyle Choice

Let me say something that will make some people uncomfortable and I am completely fine with that.

The normalisation of baby mama culture in Nigeria is not progress. It is not liberation. It is not a lifestyle choice that only affects the adults making it.

It affects the child. Every single time. Without exception.

According to the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey, single mothers constitute about 9.5 percent of women with children, with significant regional variation. Estimates from the National Bureau of Statistics suggest that over 30 percent of households are headed by women alone.

Thirty percent of Nigerian households. Headed by women alone. That is not a small number. That is not a fringe statistic. That is nearly one in three homes where a child wakes up every morning without a father present, without a father’s income, without a father’s discipline, without a father’s presence in the most critical years of their formation.

And we want to talk about this as if it is purely an adult matter. As if children are not the ones absorbing every consequence of every choice their parents made before they were old enough to have an opinion about it.

Available data indicate that approximately 11 percent of Nigerian families are headed by single parents. Many children from separated, divorced or widowed parents may not achieve their full potential, while the economic and psychosocial pressure on single parents can be enormous.

The pressure is real. The consequences are real. And yet the conversation we are having on social media is about who the baby mama flexed on, not about what we are doing to the children caught in the middle of adult drama they never asked to be born into.

Multiple Fathers. Multiple Problems. Zero Accountability.

Now before the men in the room settle back looking comfortable, I want to address you directly. Because the baby mama did not create herself.

There is a particular Nigerian man who moves through life collecting children the way other people collect stamps. Different women. Different states. Sometimes different countries. Children who share a surname but have never shared a dinner table. Children whose only experience of their father is a phone call on birthdays that sometimes comes and sometimes does not.

This man does not see himself as irresponsible. He sees himself as a man of means. A man with options. A man whose virility is evidence of his vitality.

What he actually is, is a man who has outsourced the consequences of his choices to women, to children and to a society that will spend decades managing the fallout of his freedom.

Children who witness their parents’ struggles in single-parent situations are more likely to experience emotional distress, behavioural problems and decreased academic performance. This intergenerational trauma can lead to a decline in marriage rates and an increase in single parenthood.

Bí omi ṣe ń ṣàn, bẹ́ẹ̀ náà ni ọmọ ṣe ń tẹ̀lé baba rẹ̀. As the water flows, so the child follows the father. But what happens when the father has already left before the child can follow?

The Viral Effect: When Social Media Became Our Parenting Manual

Here is where things get really interesting and by interesting I mean deeply, profoundly alarming.

In Nigeria, over 60 percent of parents do not monitor their children’s social media activity. Improper social media usage leads to issues such as cyberbullying, addiction and mental health challenges.

Sixty percent. More than half of Nigerian parents have handed their children a window to the entire world and then walked away to mind their business.

And into that unmonitored window pours everything. The content that celebrates recklessness. The influencers who built audiences on nothing but drama, nudity and the kind of behaviour that our grandmothers would have fainted at. The relationship advice delivered by twenty two year olds who have never sustained anything longer than a situationship. The money lifestyle videos shot in rented cars in front of borrowed houses teaching children that fast wealth is normal and that the route to it does not require anything as boring as hard work or integrity.

Social media has evolved from a space of casual interaction into one of the most powerful cultural forces shaping youth behaviour, values and aspirations. For today’s young people, platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and X are not merely tools for communication. They are classrooms, marketplaces, stages and political arenas.

Classrooms. That word should alarm every Nigerian parent reading this. Because if social media is the classroom, who is the teacher? And what exactly is being taught?

Social media has significant negative influences, including the erosion of traditional cultural values and the promotion of unrealistic expectations and consumerism. Our children are being raised by an algorithm. And the algorithm does not care about their character, their future or the kind of adults they will become. The algorithm cares about engagement. The more outrageous the content, the more clicks it gets. And our children are clicking.

To be continued