An Open Letter To Parents -By Usama Abdullahi

Dear parents,

May peace and blessings be on you as you peruse this letter. As your sons and daughters are about to sit for the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board Examinations, there are some essential things you need to consider. I know, as parents, you love to see your children score big in their examinations as well secure admissions at one of the well-administered and highly regarded universities in the country. And you, of course, want the best for them by financially supporting and encouraging them to give it their all so as to graduate with outstanding grades.

Yes, this is true. I can’t blame you for this. Rather, I extol your sacrifices for always being there for your children. But there’s a huge problem I spotted in some of you, our parents. Just as it’s your responsibility to call us, your children, to order when we fumble, therefore the same responsibility is on us to correct your often unintended oversights too. To be candid, most of your children seem to be the true reflection of you. They are usually what you groomed them.Though a child can act on his own while growing, yet he sometimes imitates and gets influenced by his parents.

The moral you inculcate in your children, be it good or bad, is what mould them. This doesn’t only stay with them at home. It travels with them wherever they flee to. So, the thing here is some of our parents are materialistic. They excessively value wealth more than any other thing—-even God, the one who created them. And that’s where the problem set in. These money-oriented parents have big problems to set right, for they pass onto their children the same materialistic ideology. For this reason, the children will grow up having the same liking for anything material as their parents or even worse than them.

Worst still, they force their children to go for fat courses in the high institutions. What are those fat courses? There are professional courses such as Medicine and Law. For them, these courses are lucrative and people who studied them get employed unhesitatingly. It’s true that the aforesaid courses are juicy ones, but the problem they fail to identify is those courses are highly competitive and require mighty grades. It’s disappointing that they overlook the poor ability or performance of their children and yet persuade them to apply for such courses which they could hardly make the grade.

These materialistic parents foolishly see education as a fast money-making business. In fact, they primarily send their children to schools because they want the children to be rich immediately when they leave school, regardless. Unknowningly, this helps in the deterioration of the standard of our education because most of the children study in order to know how to earn a lot of money as fast it might be, not to acquire useful knowledge. Yet it is also because of this reason that this country continues to live with such an overwhelming rate of unemployed and softheaded youth who are mostly graduates. We have children who are very good in subjects like economics or government and can perform pretty well when given economics or political science to study in the varsities.

But because they are stuck with materialistic parents, they will be forced to register for courses which their brains cannot literally afford. Sadly, they will probably end up as “failures”. Not only this but such coercion might also affect them psychologically by causing them to behave abnormally or resort to taking hard substances which will thoroughly ruin their entire lives. Parents, you should have big ambitions especially for your children but avoid being fatly ambitious. Your son/ daughter must not study to secure a job at the most “glorified” and juicy places like CBN, NNPC, SEC, PTDF, etc.You should pray and hope that he/she graduates with colorful results and secure a good paying job—not necessarily in the F.C.T, but even at your local government councils.

Usama Abdullahi wrote from Abuja, Nigeria. He can be reached via usamagayyi@gmail.com