PRG 801: Parental Guidance And Mentorship (10 Credits, “Elective”) -By Hussein Adegoke

You might want to probe the requisites for this “course” and if this writer have just the right qualifications to take you through it. But I am sorry, as I happen not to be a parent yet. This fact regardless, I have come for those who are parents and those like me with hopes of becoming progenitors sooner than later. Parenthood is a very broad subject but I hope to dabble into a little of it.

Circa 2018, I resided somewhere outside of home. My hosts were very warmly people and I have them to thank today for their hospitality. There were kids with the family that we often do play together and have good fun. But suddenly, I noticed their withdrawal from me. I couldn’t have been exactly sure of what went wrong between us. But I surely knew they were dancing to some notes of estranged decibels. Their acts were simply beyond them so I suspected their scripts were put together by a faceless adult. As for the older of the two, he could at least process the happenstances. The younger of them, a girl of about four, appeared to only have been told to debar my company but was too young and naïve to figure out why. “Tọ́pẹ́,” her mom would call someday. And on realizing she had clandestinely left her to visit me, the “praying mantis” of a mother would beat her own daughter to a pulp. “Mommy, I would not do that again,” the child’s shrill had distantly echoed. But by the next morning, the little girl had tiptoed yet again to where I was, trying to catch the fancies we had in the past. She would not just understand why I pushed her away and/or the reason her mother chased her from me. Your efforts to act in mime with a child of three would prove frantic. “Tọ́pẹ́,” her mom was calling. “Where are you?” she quizzed indistinctly. Going to meet her, the innocent girl was as good as to enter into a death trap. I was moved to intervene for her someday after she was waylaid, as frequently, but I ended up not doing so. It was the wiser option. A woman I could not even understand where I wronged her, my tacit response might bring the heavens down upon her “bigger victim”. Till date, I still can’t figure out what brought about that sudden change in her; the disappearance of her usual hospitality and departure for crassitude. The gentleman she hosted had, after all, remained the same person. But for whatever it might be, I do not suppose using innocent kids as baits to get to a “provoking” visitor should have been the better, nay, wiser, option.

Recently, I learnt of a mother whose instruction to her kids was simply as sharp as it was crude. “Don’t do ‘ma’ for your aunt again!” She had announced. The Aunt was some sister of hers with whom she was at loggerheads. And to get at the former in what seemed a clash of familial titans, the young mother of three thought the best idea was to launch her kids in the way of the ensuing imbroglio. “When she calls you, just say ‘Yes’, no ‘ma’, am I clear?” She instructed. Often times, I have heard of mothers – of especially stepsons and stepdaughters – dictate to their kids who they should respect and those they should not. They do these usually to get at an opponent who might have either riled them or that they just detest his/her attitude. “Don’t go anywhere if Iya Lagbaja should send you on an errand o!” they would sternly warn their erring kids. To flout that order, the children already know, is to be reckless and gullible.

What most parents have failed to recognize is that young minds are so much fragile and penetrable. Whatever you say to it, it does. It is the reason such force should rather be harboured for good, not for evil. You don’t expose a child to harsh judgments for reasons she could barely understand. You don’t make him bait to serve before someone, another adult, with whom you have had an altercation. Such actions, even if unintended by a parent, do worse torments to your children than they do to your targeted foe. “Was Mom not the same person who taught us to be courteous and obedient?” your children would be inclined to asking themselves. “So, why is she now asking us to disrespect Mrs Ajayi? Is Mrs Ajayi no more an elderly?” They keep probing answers for such confounding questions. But at the instant they could not understand the reasons behind your double standards, to treat Mrs Ajayi, their stepmother, with contempt, and yet be obedient to an outsider, they would rove like a bird and nest anywhere fate deemed as fit. If you are unlucky to bear touts and street urchins, it would be no fault of theirs.

We do the worst damage to kids when we make them suffer for reasons they cannot find. It is the more reason you should tell Jọkẹ́, a pilferer, her crimes, before you send her to schools of unending torture. You should let Lékan see why hooliganism spells doom for his future before you curse his first order ancestors. I mentioned earlier how difficult it could be for one to school a child without saying a word. No, that’s not completely true and not fitting for every context. Children learn best from the actions of their progenitors than they do from what they say. When you earn a living for your family by robbing others of their gains and sweats, a hundred sermons to Tunde, your five-year-old kid, to dissuade him from theft would never bear the right fruits. The girl-children of this world who end up getting impregnated at their tender ages are victims of oppressing parents. If Funke’s mother wasn’t a prostitute, to make the former take to her mother’s ways, she must have suffered from untold hardships or for some reasons she never understood. You don’t lampoon a child for an action you indulge in, yourself, and unrepentantly. If you would not like it that your kids become TV addicts, your own TV time must as well be reduced to a minimal extent. You would be a hypocrite to send Junior packing from the TV, and at about the next minute, you’re at some movies relishing the intrigues of African Magic. Such would defeat the essence of your lessons. If the boy doesn’t get the remote while you are around, he would surely do when you are not near. In fact, your frequent chase of him, without reasons, would make him all the more curious of what “Dad was hiding away.”

We can always channel the potentials in a child for good. I think it was from Ngozi Adichie I read that a father would say to his son, “Boy! Dust the shelf but don’t read the books.” The father had, in fact, wanted the boy to read but he would plead his wish uncommonly. Well, the boy had, at first, been truly compliant with the rules until a time he would find reasons behind his father’s unyielding persuasions. He would in fact do the opposite of what he was told: dusting not the books and sitting to behold them. This is what a father who recognized how positively one could exploit the innocence of child would do. Ordinarily, if you tell a child upfront to read, he might not comply so easily hence this boy’s father had devised a ploy. I know of parents who have rather allowed for their children’s memory to fester in the retention of scriptural verses rather than lewd lyrics and profanities.

I enjoyed my own childhood. I was raised in a typical African home where the father lampoons you for your bad habits and the mother calls you behind closed doors to make you see reasons why you must shun indecency. Both habits conjoined and worked in consonance on this writer to make him discover the better version of himself. However, things could fall apart for a child who was exposed to the ways of only one of my parents. The soft nature of women, if not well compensated for by father’s sternness, could bring a child to rottenness. And the converse is also true for it brings a child to cruelty. “Don’t go outside in the cold” our mothers would warn. “And if you do, rest-assured your father would know about it.” We all knew so well that to default at the latter statement (and not even the first) is what spells the greater doom. It is surely the mention of “father” that would drive us away from cold. A child is to be handled fondly and harshly, as according to what every situation demands.

Parenting is indeed a tough job altogether; and the earlier one knows this, the better. It is what a lot of people coming up to be man and wife today are barely prepared for. So, much oftenly, we find “mediocres”—children with little or no home-training—across the streets. In a bid to making ends meet, fathers had been all out to their workplaces and mothers would have gone to seek a greener pasture from far away. Their child is left at the mercy of poor neighbors and school teachers, who inflict the wrong cultures—at times, the worst torments—on innocent children.

We complain about the girl-child turning into a prostitute; we complain about boys becoming cyber-criminals, yet no one could figure out that poor parenting is just the horrible cause. Recently, I learned that whatever lessons a child acquires from age zero to ten become ingrained in him all through his life. Even as you strive hardly to correct his inadequacies, you would only be building upon what he has learnt while growing. Such child could “pretend” to have internalized your sermons but you would be caught by surprises each time you watch him reunite with the people he grew up with; his “originality” become reestablished, and your lessons would be secondary to him.

Again, one must work on oneself, firstly, before one adopts the role of a progenitor. Except in rare circumstances, if you are a religious individual, your child enshrines religiosity. If you are a degenerate fraudster, your child nurtures the swindling act. Deliberately taught or occasionally witnessed, actions of yours are those your child is bound to take after. The child you whimpered to today – to put on alert that you weren’t home when you actually were, but to repel the sight of a “troubling” visitor – would most probably tell a lie to his teachers about his “lost” assignments.

We torment children when we expose them early on to adult theatrics. It is why my heart bleeds for posterity when I consider the level of exposure of the current crop of kids to examination malpractices. A child who got to see an examiner acting surreptitiously to deter notices in exam halls while announcing answers to examination questions had been taught the combined syllabi of corruption, election rigging, ballot-box snatching, nepotism and money siphoning all at once. It should be no crime of his if he harvests his doctorate in “criminality” – a PhD (Criminality) – at such a tender ages. We call it a day from here. Parents! Submit your “assignments” before the next lecture!