We now live in a time when social media has turned the marketplace of ideas into a noisy bazaar where every opinion is shouting for validation. It is no longer enough to go to school or collect a degree. You have to sharpen your thinking just to survive the flood of insights, hot takes and half-truths that fly at you daily.
Subjects that once came with a clear moral label such as cultism, pornography, masturbation, BBL, gay and lesbian identity, cosmetic surgery, organ enlargement, smoking, alcohol, drugs..now arrive wrapped in nuance. To be fair, human, and realistic today is to sit with complexity instead of reaching for easy judgment.
It was in this confusion that I ran into a post about “poverty mentality.” The phrase has become a mirror for a lot of parents trying to raise children in the age of technology without making them fragile, and without making them lost. The argument was simple and cutting. Parents who grew up with little are, the post claimed, blocking their own progress and that of their children because they are overprotective and conservative. They remember the modesty of their background and so they delay everything: boarding school for a girl because she must first learn cooking and chores at home, a phone because she might be spoiled, a washing machine because suffering builds character, cartoons because books are safer.
I felt the tug of that argument. Things are changing fast, and adaptation is survival. Psychologist Carol Dweck’s work on “growth mindset” helps explain why this resonates. She found that people who believe abilities can be developed tend to embrace challenge, learn from failure, and seek tools that make them efficient. From that lens, refusing a washing machine or delaying digital access looks like fear, not wisdom.
Motivational speakers and influencers build whole brands on this. They sell the idea that ease, speed and exposure are the new virtues, and because they are successful they carry moral authority. Even if their success was a mix of luck, timing and networks, the story sounds clean: shed the old skin, move faster.
But there is another side, and it is older. Poverty is often treated like a curse or disease to be sanitized out of children’s lives. Yet history and research keep telling a different story. Sociologist Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic, traced how scarcity and discipline produced ambition, thrift and resilience. Psychologist Angela Duckworth’s research on “grit” shows that perseverance and long-term effort, often forged in constraint, predict achievement more than talent.
In biology we see the same logic. The sympathetic nervous system does not sharpen in comfort. It sharpens under threat. A child does not learn to run like his life depends on it when the room is cool and the food is served. He learns it when he sees the lion.
That is why I keep arguing that poverty, while painful, is also an enabler. It teaches creativity, self-reliance, endurance. It is why wealth rarely survives three generations in one family. Necessity is not just the mother of invention. It is the mother of character. To rush children into ease without a gradual transition is not generosity. It is to rob them of the friction that builds imagination.
Take constant power supply. Yes, children should watch documentaries, learn from YouTube, enjoy cartoons. But give them 24-hour light with no boundaries and you do not get scholars. You get addiction. Media studies scholar Sherry Turkle has warned for years that constant digital stimulation can fragment attention and crowd out deep work. The child who never learns to be bored never learns to think. In that case, what people call “poverty mentality”, managing ease with care is actually stewardship.
What about house chores? Is teaching a child to sweep, wash plates, cook, and do laundry outdated? The influencers say yes. They call it backward. But realism pushes back. In most African homes women still carry the bulk of domestic work, and machines fail. Economist Esther Boserup showed decades ago how household labor shapes social roles and skills. More importantly, chores are not abuse. They are training in responsibility. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that virtues are practiced, not preached. A child who learns to wash his own clothes learns patience. A child who learns to cook learns planning. A child who is raised to believe money can buy every service learns dependence. And dependence, dressed in designer clothes, is the real poverty mentality.
We see this playing out with technology too. My daughter once asked how money could live inside my phone and come out through an ATM. I struggled to explain because to her, money has always been a figure on a screen. She may never know what liquid cash feels like, what queuing at a bank teaches you about delay and trust. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes about how modernity changes the “social life of things.” When children skip the manual steps such as writing on paper, counting cash, washing by hand, they lose a layer of imagination. They can operate the app, but they do not understand the system underneath.
Africa has not fully used its advantage of hardship. The reason so many Africans and people from the Global South are sought after in the West is not despite poverty, but because of what poverty produced: risk-taking, endurance, survival instinct, ambition. Those are the raw materials that build institutions.
So the debate is not about choosing between progress and tradition. It is about sequence. Growth mindset is useful, but it needs a spine. That spine comes from basic skills, from boredom, from chores, from learning to do things the hard way before the easy way arrives. To raise children who can only function when everything is automatic, fast and paid for is to set them up for collapse in a country that still runs largely on manual systems. Running faster than your legs can carry you does not create wealth. It creates taste without capacity, and that is the fastest route to a new kind of poverty.
So, poverty mentality is not about refusing a phone or a washing machine. It is about believing that comfort alone will save your child. It won’t. What will save them is the combination: exposure plus discipline, technology plus basic skills, ambition plus the memory of what it felt like to do without. That is how you raise children who are not just consumers of the future, but builders of it.
Bagudu Mohammed is the Founder, Alternative Perspectives.
Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575
