Association For The Welfare of The Boy Child -AFTWOB has urged parents to protect young boys from consumption of harmful digital content.
Founded in 2023, the Executive Director of the Organization has told City Bite Magazine that this is part of the main reasons for the formation of the organization, which seeks to champion the inclusion of young boys and men in the conversations of gender parity.
According to Mr. Ochieng’ Abong’o, consumption of such harmful digital content as pornography and misogynistic content and psychological operations reduces the quality of development of a child’s brain cells.
“If you read about how to think like the fictional Sherlock Holmes, you’ll realize that the quality of thinking is primarily influenced with the kind of information one feeds in his or her attic,” Ochieng’said. “If you bombard your attic with explicit content, your brain cells stop to develop, and your intelligence quotient remains static,” he declared. “The intelligence quotient of a person affects all the other aspects of life, including the emotional, the social and the adversity quotient,” he said. ” This therefore means that as a child grows older, he will experience difficulties in building relationships with other people and even maintaining meaningful conversations with those around them,” he said.
The four quotient of life are determinants of a person’s performance in the four different dimensions of life i.e intellectual spectrum, Social spectrum, emotional spectrum and adversity. An individual with low intelligence quotient will struggle with cognition while those with low social quotient will struggle with building, let alone maintaining healthy relationships with others.
“When one fails to develop in these areas, it is guaranteed that they will develop personality disorders,” Ochieng’ told City Bite Magazine. “That is why you see as the world continue to digitised, there’s an increase in cases of mental illness.”
According to statistics published by World Health Organizations in 2023, cases of mental ill-health and related conditions rose by 13% from the previous year, something Mr. Ochieng’ believes will only worsen if not carefully or properly managed.
“We therefore call upon stake holders to join in the conversation,” AFTWOB IT Director Mr. Vincent Juma tells City Bite Magazine. “This is something that cannot be addressed by one person or just one organisation,” he stated. ” We must join hands, pull resources together and have this conversation with parents. We don’t want to lose our young boys to mental disorders.”
AFTWOB has most recently launched a fundraising drive to support the Education of young boys from poor and vulnerable families in Kisumu. According to the Executive Director Mr. Clifone Odima, who spoke via their official Facebook account, the program is aimed at ensuring no young boy is deprived of the right to basic education, and that none has to quit school because they lack school fee. Stakeholders are called upon to support this drive through any sort of donation, material or monetary to bring this cause to fruition.
