RAISING A GENERATION OF WEAK CHILDREN
It’s your fault. You started this. You started it long time ago when you resolved that your children would not pass through the difficulties you went through. Your love for them made them weak.
Your parents prepared you for the challenges ahead. They allowed you to solve many of your problems. They only guarded and guided. They allowed you to go to WAEC office to check your WASSCE result. You even travelled to Ikoyi to check UME and PCE results. But you consider your children too young and inexperienced to do anything for themselves. The same children that you put in school at age 2 have suddenly become too young.
You rushed them through childhood thinking cognitive achievements would see them through. They can’t even keep their own records. When they register for exams, you keep photo cards and slips. You will keep result checkers too. When results are out, you rush to cafes to check and print them. You followed them everywhere and show them everything as if they were blind. You follow them to register for JAMB, your phone number is on the registration form, you stayed in the car on the exam day, immediately after exam, you zoom them home.
They never get the chance to socialize. They can’t even discuss contents and conduct of the exam with fellow candidates. You won’t let them stay back a second but you stayed back on the day of your own exam. You made new friends and all of you, strangers to one another, went to buy snacks together. You were all talking and smiling as if you had known one another for years but your children can’t do this. “What else are you waiting for?” is the question from your raised voice.
When results are out, you will receive the notification. You will be the one to go and print the result and start thinking of how to get admission processed. Finally when admission is secured, you will still be the one to go to banks and pay all fees. You will also travel down to look for their accommodation. Unfortunately, you can’t follow them to campus, you would have preferred to attend every lecture with them. You inevitably, relax the apron string at this stage and allow them to face life by themselves for the first time.
They now have to, for the first time in their entire life, do things by themselves and for themselves. There’s no more mom and dad to think, act, predict, assume and foresee events any more. Then the vicissitudes of life come knocking. They fail four courses out of nine in 100 level but struggle to move on. When it happens again in 200L and 300L, they consider all the hardships of the last two years, the suffering is magnified in their weak minds, they find no one to talk to, they blame themselves and you for creating the hardship, thus they resolve to opt out of life.
Dear parents, allow your children to grow up. Allow them make their mistakes, build a level of dependence on themselves and chart their own course. I know you are quite rich, but allow them experience a level of hardship. You should even induce a degree of hardwork around the home to check how they can survive outside the canopy of your feathers. Stop raising weak children because the world out there is for the strong.
