As far as humans are concerned, there are different institutions a human being passes through during his/her development. There’s the religious institution, society and the family institution. The latter is the first and oldest institution a human is introduced into before coming in contact with the rest. As the first, this institution plays the most crucial role in the development and shaping of a man/woman’s life.
In today’s world, there’s so much complaining about how bad the society is, but they forget that the society is merely a secondary stage of the family set-up. Basically, it is what the family churns out that the society receives and moulds further. This means that, if the society receives damaged goods, it only helps to condemn it even further and vice-versa.
The bible scriptures say, “teach a child in the way he should grow and when he grows, he won’t depart from it.” This much is true as the positives, as well as the negatives, stick in the minds of children till the day they die. All the more reason why positive values should be trumped up from their early days of infancy so we have far less damaged goods being transferred to the society and religious institutions.
This has, however, not been the case, especially when you look at the society of today. A closer look at the family tells you why. You find that a lot of parents have consciously and unconsciously brought up their children in the wrong way. The area I seek to highlight in this article is that of child favouritism and bad parenting as these are prevalent in many homes today.
What many parents fail to understand is that children don’t follow instructions: They follow examples. How? You may ask. Now, if you instruct a child never to lay his hands on a woman, only for you to turn around and beat your wife during an argument, there’s a very high probability that the child will grow up to become a ferocious woman beater. Your instruction was not followed, rather, the example you showed was.
Children are very curious and observant. You can only trick them for so long. I have a friend who is a tobacco smoker. He told me how his father used to warn him against smoking whenever they walked by a bar. However, when his dad returned at night, he would perceive the scent of cigarettes on his dad’s clothes. Curiosity got the better of him and one day, he went sniffing around his dad’s stuff and saw an empty pack of cigarettes. Since then, there was no turning back and years later, he became an active smoker till date.
As Parents, you are like a potter—you shape and define a child’s life. The way you craft a child is the way he’ll go and this much is evident in the handling of siblings. Let us assume, for example, that as a parent you have 4 children. The mentality of each of those children begins from your doorstep. Events and moments they experience under your tutelage will shape their minds, behaviours, characters, personality and attitude for life. You see why this aspect of parenting is very vital? I’ll elaborate even more.
There is something called “favouritism.” This is a situation where it becomes obvious to your other children who the favourite son or daughter is. You get so carried away that you lavish that favourite child with gifts that the others wouldn’t receive. You make it a clarion call to compare the other siblings to the favourite child and rub their failures in their faces. What you do not realise you are actually doing is sowing a seed of discord that will, not only affect them, but you as well.
There was a family I grew up with during my childhood. The parents had 3 children. Everyone on the street knew who the favourite child was—the second born. Any occasion they had to attend, they always took the girl child along, leaving behind her two brothers. If the brothers came 2nd or 3rd positions in school, the parents were quick to remind them of how their sister always came 1st position in class. Nothing these boys did was ever good enough for the parents. As young as I was, I could sense a looming disaster waiting to engulf this family.
After we moved out of the area, I lost track of them for so many years. 22 years down the line, I reconnected with one of the brothers via social media and went visiting. In a matter of hours, I could gather that the brothers had cut ties with their parents. They don’t talk with their sister either. The elder brother, who is in Canada, doesn’t communicate with the family, save for his younger brother. The family is essentially scattered and it came as no surprise to me as I had already seen it coming a long time ago.
You cannot have cliques within the family. This is not the university where you have fraternities and sororities for crying out loud. The family is supposed to be one indivisible body standing strong together no matter the weather. A family that sticks together, lasts together, but you cannot achieve that when there is bad blood, unhealthy sibling competition, unnecessary comparison and favouritism. Those can never foster unity and togetherness. They are building blocks for the future collapse of the family structure. A family is supposed to hide their shame and work out their fame together, not compete with one another.
A lot of African parents have failed in their responsibilities. Nurturing and grooming children should be done free of sentiment, bias, comparison and favouritism. You are the guardian: You are supposed to guide them right, not inculcate values that will mess up their psychology or cause a mental health issue for them. Today, we see so many people with low self-esteem. A lot of its roots started with the way these people were raised by their parents.
You have people going into society with the get-rich-at-all-cost mentality simply because of the constant comparison their parents had subjected them to. The result is a spike in crime wave and other ungodly behaviour.
Once the family institution fails a child, there is very little other institutions, like the churches/mosques and society, can do to remedy the damage. It’s like an object before a blacksmith. He can only shape it while it is hot. Once it gets cold, it will maintain that shape forever. Children are that object, while the parents are the blacksmith. The parent must spend the early days carving the object in the proper way before time runs out. Parents simply need to wake up and do better.
