Teachers and househelps not your child’s parents

Students are seen in Nakuru town on October 27, 2016 after most schools closed for the long December holiday. PHOTO | SULEIMAN MBATIAH | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Our model of parenting is to find a “good” school for our children and let the teachers handle everything.
  • We are constantly enquiring about “good” househelps capable of practically running our homes while we are away.
  • As the children enter adolescence and go away to boarding school, they are total strangers to their parents.

As the school term comes to an end, some parents have been heard complaining that they do not know what to do with their children for the long two-month holiday.

Some have demanded fee refunds claiming they paid for a longer term, and that they need the money to buy food for their children during the holidays.

But the main emphasis in most protests is that these parents are at a loss as to how to keep their children occupied.

These protests bring home the reality of Kenyan (mostly urban middle-class) parenting. Our model of parenting is to find a “good” school for our children and let the teachers handle everything.

At home, we are constantly enquiring about “good” househelps capable of practically running our homes while we are away. Our children are therefore being brought up by two sets of people who, for all practical purposes, are strangers.

Developmental psychology is emphatic that children have a critical period of their lives when their minds can be considered super-absorbent.

They quickly make observations and connections, and they learn best at this time by imitation. In our model of child upbringing, our children spend most of this impressionable period with people whose values their parents may not share.

Due to the current structure of school curricula and the congested nature of the modern classroom, most teachers are too busy trying to complete the syllabus to think of acting as surrogate parents.

In any case their influence is easily counterbalanced by that of the househelp, who ends up being the actual surrogate parent.

In the end, as the children enter adolescence and go away to boarding school (another quirk of modern Kenyan parenting), they are total strangers to their parents. A parent will stare in astonishment one day when the son they always considered docile faces them and harshly answers them back.

IMPORTANT DECISIONS

They will wonder when their daughter changed and stopped listening to their advice before making important decisions.

They will ship their child off to university and forget about them, sending the regular upkeep cheque and “responsibly” paying fees on time, only to discover after three or four years that their child was long ago expelled from university and lives off their allowance in a neighbouring slum.

This is the inevitable consequence of our parenting style. To make matters worse, we are whining publicly about being clueless around our own children, and asking schools to keep them away a while longer while we prepare to deal with them.

We are obviously not clued in to the fact that these children can read from a very early age, and they have access to the newspapers that publish our rants, and online sites that amplify our outrage.

They can see through our duplicity when we act all sweet and caring around them, when they know that we would rather have them spend more time away from us.

It is perfectly understandable that today’s hectic life routines leave us with very little time to take care of our homes and families.

Indeed, the search for the elusive shilling often means we are out of the house before dawn and are back way after dusk. The result is that even when our children are at home we hardly get time to interact with them.

But the truth is that we have up to two days a week during the weekend when we can put everything aside and spend quality time with our families. Even one day of bonding a week goes a long way in ensuring healthy families, and healthy growth trajectories for our children.

In fact, even spending a few hours at the beginning or end of the day with our children to find out what challenges they are facing and how they’re tackling them helps them to develop values in line with our own.

It doesn’t actually take much more than being present and modelling desirable behaviour to have your child take on our habits. Even more importantly, it doesn’t take exorbitant “holiday trips” to accomplish this!

Atwoli is associate professor of psychiatry and dean, School of Medicine, Moi University; [email protected]