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Dear parents of my darling, precious, glorious, dignified, world-famous and heavenly celebrated Nigerian sisters,
If you want to damage your children emotionally, compare them unfavourably with other children! It’s such a cruel way to deal with your children even when you probably don’t mean to in a bid to ginger them up academically or in other endeavours! Only a few of today’s youth would get over it easily and take it as a challenge to overtake whoever you’re comparing them with! Also, some parents do this excessively even when it isn’t necessary. As I mentioned two weeks ago, some parents are not intentional about their parenting and fail to see their children’s challenges which are no fault of theirs and also cannot recognise their sterling qualities and work on these areas. THIS IS SO SHAMEFUL! And in fact wicked! The other day, a young lady wrote this on Instagram:
“I’m literally sick and tired of coming home every time to witness the mental torture my parents put my brother through because he’s written UTME twice and didn’t get admitted. I can’t wait to start working and get an apartment of mine so I can move in with my young man and help him escape all this rubbish! This was a boy that grew up with ADHD without a support system to back him up. Took him going to a boarding school to gain some balance and assert himself. He was unbelievably top of his class. And every now and then he suffers reproof and public shaming because he never seems to be enough.
He’s literally become a shadow of himself. No friends, no social life, nothing. Imagine constantly being reminded that you’re a useless first son because you repeated three classes and your younger sister has caught up with you. Or being compared to your peers who are ahead of you every single day. I lost 16kg in less than a year because of this. Went from 79 to 63kg because I had to spend one more depressing year at home feeling like a failure because I wasn’t admitted into the university. As I look at my brother daily, all I see is a young man struggling so hard to get out of a sunken place. He told me the only time he’s truly happy is when I’m around!
How much do you have to hate your home for you to not want to be there? I honestly don’t know who it was that added insulting comparisons, mental/verbal abuse and degradation to the list of parenting skills. I don’t understand why you need to walk the path of torturing your own child in order to pass a message! We’re always very quick to eulogise our parents, which isn’t a bad thing. But we should also be swift to admit when they get things entirely wrong. A lot of us are going to re-enact the bad parenting we experienced in the hands of our parents to our own kids because we saw nothing wrong in it!”
You can just imagine the deep-seated disappointment and bitterness this young lady has towards her parents for her to have vented out and written this and got the attention of instablog naija – one of the most popular Instagram handles in Nigeria! How my heart goes to the young man who must be wishing a lot of times that he was never born. However, I thank God he has a strong sister who can see him through becoming the world’s greatest! I also feel really terrible that this young lady is at the risk of falling in love with the wrong person because she needs a lot of fawning over to heal her aching soul. If she spends more time in her boyfriend’s home, getting into all manner of expression of love- giving her body, mind and soul to a man so she can forget her cold, loveless and heartless home, I’d be the first to blame her for engaging in premarital sex(if she did)! Yet, she and her brother are being brutally tossed into the wilderness of life!
A lot of mothers who slipped and fell into the wrong marriages because they got pregnant or who just found themselves as single mothers and had their dreams scuttled would rather slut-shame their girls when they see guys around them. They start too late in ensuring they don’t follow their pattern, I dare say all they’re left with is a damage control! What a reckless way of life! You can instill all the world’s discipline in your children and treat them as though they’re your heart-beat! You can still drive all the fear you want to drive into them while at this. It would go a long way in determining what would become of your daughter, how she would handle her relationship with guys, the type of man she would end up with and the type of children she would raise in future. May you have peace over your children in your old age!
To be continued.
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