Youths are the backbone of the every society needed to take up from the outgoing generation. They are the greatest assets any community or society possesses because they are investments.
Youthful denotes a period of existence while youthfulness denotes uninhibited ,enthusiastic liveliness etc.
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During the youthful phase in life, they are prone to behavioural influences which can either Mar or make them. It's a phase in life where all the want to do is explore, for into the crowd,live life have fun at this point they are more resistant to authority, they challenges actions or decisions made by parents. They become bored and unsatisified .
Youth exuberance overcomes rational thinking ,destroys the youth and leads to tragedy likely because of mistakes.
At this stage they want to be let free to go out and explore and their exploits includes smoking,drinking and clubbing.
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They want to take decisions based on what they want not on the consequence or the outcome. At this point, there is usually a thin line to destroying their future and making their life count.
One of the causes of youthful exuberance in Africa can be attributed to the individual family or household. The family has totally failed in its quest to fully inculcate morals and social values into its offsprings; which is partly due to economic difficulties and institutional breakdowns.
Perhaps, most parent today do not spend enough time with their wards, rather they register them with daycare and other foster homes in other to escape their parental responsibilities for them to have sufficient time to transact their businesses which will inturn generate income to upkeep the family.
As a result of this, most children grow into youth lacking appropriate upbringing and knowledge of social norms; this has led to astronomical increase in the numbers of miscreants, street urchins ,cultist and rapist prevalent among the youth in the society.
Furthermore,it is disheartening to see a creative mind spent in creating ideas on how to destroy the lives of others; this has to do with youth using their talents and vitality wrongly, they are being used by diabolical politicians as well as disgruntled leaders for settling scores against one another, this chain of dreadful activities of the youth have resulted into outright criminality and as well increase the rate of violence in the society.
Similarly, peer pressure is a contributive factor which can easily pollute the youth's mind,in the quest to equate the level of their peers when actually they don't have sufficient resources to fit in, they then result into the exemplification of corruptible acts such as prostitution, robbery, fraud amidst others which would inturn dent the family's image.
Also, civilization has brought about an attitudinal change amoth the Nigerian youth, the advancement in communication,information and technology has deprived the Nigeria youth of their cultural values and imbibed in them foreign culture which is perceived to be immoral and absurd.
Additionally, exposure to to violent media messages and movies has in no small way contributed to this, majority of our youth today have turned drug addicts,sex toys etc as they exemplified what they are been exposed to on the media and movies; this has been affirmated by different theories of media violence such as the
INSTIGATOR THEORY as authenticate by Grenberg's research, it stated that "viewing violence leads to violence, especially in children" and The IDENTIFICATION THEORY which stated that "children,particularly, always want to imitate their heroes or film actors". Alberta siegel a comm. scholar, in one of his works
THE EFFECTS OF MEDIA VIOLENCE ON SOCIAL LEARNING cites how television chiefs in Britain issued a warning to millions of youngsters upon an inquest on a boy who died in his home in Leicester after imitating his masked and cloaked hero Batman.
Conclusively, one of the solutions to youthful exuberance is that each home should try to create sufficient time for their children so as to perform their primary function of nuturing and moulding their wards into a responsible citizen and as well should not allow the quest for improving their financial standard to over-shadow the responsibility as a parents.
Meanwhile,government should provide corrective and punitive measures to tackle anti-social/moral behaviours and stay puritanical to it.