Parental Guidance (PG) is only a license given to parents to practice law within the home, not a right to practice the tyranny of indulgence as many of us do presently
Modern children no longer have any dreams; their modern parents dream for them. Just think. From the time of their conception, it is the parents who decide when and where their children receive formal education. They go ‘We’re homeschooling Jnr. We don’t want him coming in contact with the ruffians they release into schools these days.’ It is the parents who also decide where Jnr. receives his secondary education. So, when Jnr. goes, ‘But all my friends are going to the public school!’ you’ll say ‘You’ll go to this very special school even if it kills you. Your father went there, your grandfather went there, your great grandfather went there. You think you are too special to go to the same school your ancestors attended?’ Then, it’s the parents who get to perform all kinds of experiments on the little ones. ‘Jnr. is getting too big for his shoes these days, not so? It’s because he doesn’t have to struggle for his food. Let’s throw him into my uncle’s house where they have ten children and then we’ll see how he grows up.’ As I read somewhere, there is no dictatorship in the world that can compare to that of a parent.
Just as parents have learnt to be tyrannous, so children have learnt to be wise. There is no sage in the world, not even Solomon, who can confront the wisdom of children. Children learn early that life is a lot more comfortable and easier when they simply obey mama and papa. They also tend to live longer than the parents. It’s not just the destiny thing at work; it’s the fact that they sit back, relaxed, as they watch their parents sweat themselves out taking decisions about their children’s lives, and then proceed to source for the means to execute the decisions. And so, while the parents are huffing and heaving on how Jnr. can finish school and go to Europe for his Masters, the said Jnr. is setting benchmarks for the town’s social life with his pals who find themselves in the same boat: waiting for their parents to get the money for their trip. Now, tell me, who is wiser?
Growing up in the habit of not thinking for themselves, our children have gone out of control mainly because their parents have spiraled out of control in their mindless pursuit of relevance in the lives of the poor things. I once spent some early morning hours looking for hostel accommodation for my sleeping son. Many children are not even allowed to think. ‘And what do you want to be when you grow up?’ ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll ask my mum’. Mum says, DOCTOR, and Jnr. returns: ‘I want to be a doctor.’
One of the most unfortunate things about this country is this lack of policy about anything other than ‘let everyone go and grow up in the best way they can’. Just as there is no transport policy other than ‘don’t ride on other people’s backs’, no housing policy other than ‘make sure your house does not topple on anyone other than yourself’, no town planning policy other than ‘don’t build on Aso Rock’, no speeding policy except ‘speed but don’t get caught’, so also there is no youth policy other than ‘children, go to school’. And so, children find themselves completely at the mercy of their parents and their peers on life’s little advances and rules. Yet, no one is more unequipped to hand out good rules than parents who are caught in the throes of deriving severe pleasures from the tyranny they exercise over their children. To prolong this tyranny, many parents have been known to beg, borrow or steal.
Why do parents have a compelling need to control their children’s lives in Nigeria? I honestly don’t know. In Europe, I understand children can go make their own way in the world by the age of eighteen, no matter how rich their parents. In Nigeria, however, some unreleased masochistic tendencies are standing in the way of good sense. Did you notice that these tendencies began to manifest at about the same time that the AIDS virus was released into the air? The two have some things in common too. They generally affect men and women, do not discriminate between rich and poor and both are terminal diseases. Perhaps, some parents’ educational-cum-career development processes were so tough in the days of few opportunities that they swore their children would not be so inopportune. Perhaps, and this is my favourite, many parents have realised that the world has been made so unsafe (possibly by them) and so they have to protect their wee ones. Perhaps, modern Nigerian parenthood is now a minefield filled with vanity and ego … Who knows, really?
Whatever the causes, there are no doubts about the results. Somewhere in the deep recesses or the twilight zones of dreams lie the unrealized ones of these children. Then, those children spend their days in a daze of wonder: what is the next instruction, O Parent Almighty? Worse, they find themselves moving from one dizzying experience to snap-crackle-snap. One such son did, not too long ago. The papers reported how he had been so indulged in drink and drugs that he hardly knew what he was doing anymore, not even being able to account for how he came to have killed an unfortunate young lady. Rather than help him face his demons, however, his all-knowing mother ‘helped’ him to flee justice by parceling him abroad. There, he fared no better, of course, until he was forced to come back home and resume his lifestyle. In frustration one day, he was said to have come to his own eureka – his mother was behind his ruin, and snuffed the life out of her.
There is yet the story of another young man who had also been indulged from youth because he was the only male among a bevy of female children. Unfortunately, he was not able to resolve his own internal turbulence. That’s right. He set his parent’s house on fire for their tardiness in providing him what he had been used to. I know of yet several stories in which sons (it happens to daughters too, I know) sold their doting mothers’ entire investments of jewelry while both women were abroad. It led to their deaths, at different times, of course.
Parental Guidance (PG) is only a license given to parents to practice law within the home, not a right to practice the tyranny of indulgence as many of us do presently. When a modern Nigerian parent learns that his recently graduated son has fixed his starting salary at over two hundred thousand Naira in a job interview as we reported on this page sometime ago, does he become outraged? Most of us are not. That is where the problem lies. We should be outraged. In fact, we should be so outraged that we want to spank his graduate behind. Rather, most of us are so proud of his savvy highness that we shake his hand and croon, ‘Well done, son, you are your father’s scion.’ And that is our tragedy.
Now, most fathers’ scions simply lounge in the sitting room waiting for their fathers to come home with funds pilfered from government coffers. Ah, ah, did we not just hear that a former army chief is said to have built or bought a multimillion Naira house for his son? Naturally, many children’s dreams seem to have been lost along the way in their parents’ pilfering careers Do please let the children have their dreams back.
- Part of this article was first published in 2011. We have reproduced it here to celebrate this year’s children’s day.