It's 2014 and we still can't talk about sex?

When the rest of the world is constantly and consistently thinking of means and ways to better the future of our younger generation, we tend to forget about the fundamentals of living – protection.

Any parents who think that child marriage is for the best interest of the child are dead wrong.

The United Nations estimated that between 2011 and 2020, over 140 million children – mostly girls – will become child brides.

Though Malaysia has adopted the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) which actively endorses to end child marriages, the statistical data show otherwise; the number of child marriages in our country is ever increasing.

Following the recent child marriage in Johor – where a 15-year old boy married his 17-year old girlfriend, with the consent of both parents – it makes me wonder, what kind of parents are we?

What kind of parents have we become when we coolly opt to jeopardise our children’s future by exposing them to the risks of pregnancy, damaging and hurting them physically and psychologically?

What kind of parents are we for putting a huge burden on our son’s shoulder at the age where he has just started to discover his own body and mind? At the age when he is lacking of life experiences that require a whole lot of support from his parents to shape him into adulthood?

What kind of parents are we to take on a crucial decision allowing such union to happen at such a crucial age of cognitive development?

Heck, when I was 15, I was still climbing trees like a monkey (my mom would say) plucking mangoes.

What kind of parents are we to resort to the holy matrimony of teenagers as a method to protect children from immoral sexual activities?

The way I see it, child marriage is an easy way out of parenting where parents would prefer giving up their child for marriage rather than educating them to proper sex education and abstinence.

Especially for Malay parents, why in this era of modernity that educating children about sex and abstinence is still frowned upon? It is 2014 and we still can’t open up to talk about sex?

On a different note but still on parenting, I was appalled by a TV personality’s decision to not turn back and search for his eight-year old son after realising (hours later) that he had driven off without the boy.

Mohd Zainuddin, or PU Yeop, a participant of the reality show "Pencetus Ummah", said he had been so preoccupied with a religious talk that he was due to deliver that he and his family had forgotten about one of their six children who went down for toilet break at an R&R along the North-South Expressway.

What kind of parenting is this? Prioritising work over the safety and security of his very own flesh and blood? If this is not negligence then I don't know what to call it.

Really, what kind of parents have we become when we fail to be our very own children’s protector?