BAD PARENTING

DIARY OF A WAYWARD PARENT:

How not to do good parenting.

By margaretta wa gacheru (margaretta.gacheru@gmail.com)(posted to DN 12.5.2021)

We often hear about how to be a good parent; about all the things you ought to do to ensure your child excels in school, and is prepared to enjoy a healthy, happy, fulfilling, and successful life.

We are assured children benefit most when parents give them ‘quality time’, feed them healthy food, give them warm clothes, and a consistent routine of hours in which they can do their homework, ideally assisted by parents who might even share a good book or story or even a prayer with them every night before they go to bed.

Good parenting involves work, especially to keep track of your child. It isn’t easy these days to ensure your child is disciplined, but it helps if you the parent are able to keep track of where they are, who they are with, what they are up to, and when they are fulfilling the daily duties you ask them to complete in order to be responsible members of your family.

If this sounds theoretical and old fashioned, it probably is, but that doesn’t make it outmoded. On the contrary, monitoring your child’s whereabouts and what they are putting into their heads is the reason some parents are concerned about letting their children into social media before they are mature enough to handle the language, the imagery and some of the issues tackled by social media, including pornography and other unhealthy ideas.

Whether all parents are this strict or consider all of the above as essential skills required to be a good parent is not my concern. What I am an expert in is the what NOT to do to be a good parent.

Frankly, you will rarely hear about what not to do since there is such a big stigma and so much shame attached to not being a good parent. It would seem that parents, especially mothers get judged by how successful are their offspring. In this regard, women get a bad deal. First off, they are stigmatized if they are barren and don’t have kids. Childbearing still seems to be a major consideration for measuring a woman’s goodness or worthiness in society. But then if she does have kids, how many? If she only has one, she is selfish because the one deserves to have a sibling, the logic goes. And if she has too many, whether it is more than two, four, ten, or more, then she’s in trouble with the World Bank or some other international population agency that determines what number is required in our day and age.

The main thing about being a so-called ‘good parent’ seems to be the ability to make sacrifices for your child’s well-being and future. Sacrifice requires selflessness on the part of the parent, and selflessness means caring about another more than one cares about one’s self. Selflessness is what we more often see manifest in motherhood. Frankly, fathers in these times often seem to be skipping the scene once they are asked to make too many or even any sacrifices for the sake of the child and even for the woman who he ensured would give birth to the child he will claim, and possibly even boast about (if the mom does a good job parenting the child).

But sadly, men tend to be the ones who have “better” things to do than parenting. Historically, they do not change nappies, bathe babies, feed them, or put them to bed. All that is considered the work of a mother or house maid. And even though times are changing, and some men are even seen holding their child in shopping malls or on the streets. But that is either because they have been school abroad and have seen that Western men are responding to women’s demands they share in the work of child care. Or else you see men carrying a child when the wife is walking just behind carrying at least one child in her arms, and possibly having another one on her back and another one holding her hand as the family treks from one insecure home to another place who knows where.

As it turns out, the typical male who becomes a deadbeat dad embodies much of what NOT to do to be a good parent. But I contend that there even worse things than one parent not paying the rent or buying the baby food or rarely being around. All those things reflect an insensitivity to what’s required to be a good parent. But there are other factors that one needs to know about what not to do to be a good parent.

Starting from the beginning, one should take care not to listen the critics who complain about various personal things in your life. They may criticize your relationship with your new partner. These are people who could be family members or close friends, but their comments can be poisonous. They may not like the partner’s nationality, height, weight, career, non-career, accent or prospects for providing a solid future financially. All of these criticisms are superficial and materialistic; so what not to do is listen to their ugly remarks. Be careful who you allow to know about that prospective partner because you will be judged, rumor-mongered, and discussed by every Tom, Dick and Harry, every Wanjiku, Atieno, Mweu and Halima that you may know.

So that is first. Be wise about who you let into your listening ear. Their poison can be subtle and sly. It can be ruinous, especially once the prospect of a baby comes into the picture.

Those same critics will have lots to say about pregnancy. For men, their buddies might view the partner as a conquest and get the guy to look as his mate as more of a sexual object than he had originally. If it’s a woman who ‘starts to show’, people will definitely have opinions. But again, don’t listen. If you do, you may suffer for the rest of your life. Why?

Because some so-called friends or family may advise you not to have the kid. Now I am not speaking as one who is against abortion. I will not speak on that topic except to say I believe a woman must be free to make her own choice about what she does with her body. But the critics who didn’t like the partner in the first place may have limitless comments about how you will be destroying your possibilities in life by staying with that person and having their child. They might claim they care about you and know you had other plans, so why not put those plans first. Forget about making the sacrifices required to be a parent. They will tell you it won’t be worth it. You have better things to do.

And okay, once you have a child, the critics may also claim you can still give that baby up. They will remind you that is what orphanages are for. They may tell you the child will be better off in a foster home or with an adoption agency that will place your child with people who really want your baby.

Again, do not listen. Bad parenting begins with listening, even when those speaking to you seem to be benevolent and caring. What are they caring about? Not good parenting for sure.

Let’s be clear that historically, children in Kenya were treasured. They were raised not just by one father and one mother. They were raised by a community so they had multiple aunties and uncles, many family members and friends who felt responsible themselves to look after your child, be it to give them food, to guide them on their way, and to love them as if the children were their own, which back then, they were.

Let’s also be clear that the proliferation of divorce among married couples contributes immensely to bad parenting. One needs to consider deeply whether separation or divorce is the best way to go, both for the parents as well as the kids. For the so-called friends may tell you that the child will be okay when it at least has one parent looking after them. But that is a difficult argument to make. We hear about success stories of single mothers like Kanye West’s mom and Usher’s mom and even Tupac’s mom. They did valiant jobs raising their children and proved that good parenting can be achieved by a single parent. But even in those cases, the parent had to struggle and get help wherever they could.

One might look at all the women who have stayed in a marriage that was utterly unsatisfactory. The spouse was rarely around, was unloving, uncooperative, and most of all, non-communicative. The temptation to see those women as sacrificial lambs who are victimized by their spouse is easy to believe. Her staying in an unhealthy marriage is not necessarily ‘good parenting’ in any case. Why? Because the children can see that their mother is wasting her vast potential being subservient to a nasty man.

But before you decide you don’t want to stick in a marriage because the spouse is ‘useless’ or unloving or not meeting your expectations, I recommend you not judge too swiftly. If domestic violence is involved, then I frankly would help that mama to get out of that relationship and fast. If the spouse is an alcoholic or a druggie or addicted to any obsessive habit, then there may be grounds there for walking away from the mate.

Bottom line, the point is that good parenting may involved many things that can be defined materially. But the real issue is where is the love? Where and how can one be the most loving, first to one’s self but also to one’s offspring. What’s most important in all this is to remember that we make choices. We are the agents of our destinies, whether we feel God is guiding our lives or fate is in charge or Allah, Jehovah, or Jesus Christ is the master of our circumstance. We are still the one who has to listen for the ‘still small voice’ whether one calls it intuition, insight, or God.

Making choices to be a good parent starts way before you actually have a child so it makes sense to plan ahead. Not that you need to figure out who your mate will be before you meet him or her. But most people know whether they want children and want to be excellent parents or whether they really don’t want kids because they have other priorities in their lives.

Becoming a parent ‘by accident’ is the most hazardous thing that a person can do with their lives which is why I am a proponent of quality sex education. I believe in advising young people about the consequences of their messing around sexually. The women and girls are the ones who suffer the most since guys can easily disappear once they are called upon to take responsibility for their lust and their egotistical assertion of manhood on a child, teenager, or adult. So teaching children at the earliest age possible about the goodness of staying safe (meaning not getting pregnant) is something I would advocate.

If you believe bad parenting involves teaching your child about sex, I would disagree. Keeping silent on one of the most important issues of human life and the life of your child is cruel, especially because adults know what could be the worst thing to happen to their son or daughter.

So I am convinced that by learning about a few bad parenting habits, parents can get a better of view of what’s truly involved in good parenting. It all begins and ends with love.