Raising 21st Century Children Beyond Your Niche As A Parent should make for an important read for any parent hoping to improve their skillsets towards raising functional and fit-for-purpose children in the 21st century.
Love to kick start this article titled: 21st Century Parenting-Raising Today’s Children Beyond Your Niche.” with a question, which says, if your children were to stay with their friends and relatives, would their hosts be impressed?
Am sure you will be wondering what kind of question this is, or what I am driving at. As you are reading with me, I am confident that you will have a lot to learn and unlearn.
In my exposure and experience as a family counselling therapist, there is something I discovered recently.
I found out that some youngsters of today are offensively lazy, exhibit lots of naughty attitudes, and complacent.
They love the good things in life and want to live largely but are too lazy to lift a finger to do anything meaningful to gain those things they desire.
I have seen occasions where youngsters on vacation or staying briefly with family friends or relatives ended up painting their families black or denting their parent’s image.
They gave their hosts the impression that they lacked good home training and that their parents failed woefully in their parenting duties of raising them properly.
Putting the Lesson in Context
To help us understand what I am driving better, let me give a few illustrations here:
Akinfemi, 21 years old is waiting for his call-up letter to go for the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC). For those who are not in the know, the NYSC is a one-year mandatory employment experience for fresh graduates in Nigeria.
For the time being, he is staying with his maternal aunt and her family. Akinfemi would follow up on all the soap operas and football matches on television, from day to day.
He stays up till long after midnight watching different television programs or chatting online.
The aunt’s husband washes his car by himself every morning, while Akinfemi sits on the balcony watching him and smiling at invincible beings on his phone.
Of course, he thinks he has no business with the kitchen except to go and drop the plates he used to eat in the kitchen sink.
Saying thanks to the owners of the house after eating was an honour too hard for him to give.
He dominates family discussions at times and gives the impression that he is well-read and highly knowledgeable.
Raising 21st Century Children Beyond Your Niche As A Parent
Even the presence of visitors and friends of the family does not make him a little circumspect in his contributions.
Conversely, 16-year-old Sharon went to write her post-UTME in another town. Her parents begged one of their friends in that town to allow Sharon to stay with them for the two weeks she would be there.
The family readily agreed. The mother of the house works from home while the husband goes to work outside their home.
The couple has 3 children ages 8, 6 and 4 years respectively. The family has no domestic servant, so the mother of the three children had to do all the house chores, by herself.
Sharon would stay in the living room watching television or in her room with her phone or studying while the woman of the house would be cooking in the kitchen.
After eating, Sharon would wash only the plates she used to eat and leave the rest in the sink for her hostess to wash. Some mornings she would take the hoover and clean only the room where she was staying and leave the rest of the house unkempt.
She never bothered to assist the madam of the house in getting the kids ready for school in the morning, and neither did she ever think of helping them to do their homework in the evenings.
On two or more occasions, the woman left Sharon in the house and went to the market to buy food items for the family. When she came back, Sharon opened the door for her, murmured a kind of greeting and promptly returned to her room and closed the door.
The woman had to go downstairs to pick up the remaining shopping bags where the taxi dropped them, unpacked the items she purchased hurried to clear the plates used in the morning and left in the kitchen. After that, she had to prepare lunch before rushing out to pick up her children from school.
All the while, Sharon was with her phone in the room. Throughout her stay in that house, Sharon never cleaned the bathroom or the toilet she was using, and would never help the woman wash her children’s clothes nor assist in any domestic work.
18-year-old Titilope is another similar example. She was spending her second-semester break in the house of one of their family friends in another town and would do nothing but chat on her phone all day long and listen to loud music.
She comes out during mealtime, eats her meals, dumps the plates in the kitchen sink and goes back to the room. In the morning she reluctantly joins in the family morning devotion, after which she goes back to bed till the later hours of the morning when the owners of the house would have gone to work and the housekeeper would have done the whole house chores.
She takes her bath, dresses up, goes to the kitchen for her breakfast and thereafter retires to her room till the next mealtime. Wonderful, isn’t it?
There are several other examples, but I think these few would suffice. In all of these cases, do you think that the hosts of these youngsters would be impressed or happy to have them around? Your guess is as good as mine.
Do any of these young people represent your child? That is, do you think that your children are likely to behave like any of the children depicted above if allowed to stay in another person’s house?
If your children have any reason to be hosted for some time by another family, will their host miss them and wish they stayed longer or will they heave a sigh of relief when they finally leave their house?
As a parent, foster parents, single parents or intending parents, please ponder on the analogies enumerated above very well.
Let us put heads together to make these wonderful children of ours, beauties for the world to behold and desirable folks to stay with 24/7.
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Raising 21st Century Children Beyond Your Niche As A Parent
Highlighting Parental Responsibilities
As a parent in any capacity, it’s expected of you to ensure the following:
- Give your children age-appropriate domestic tasks, even if you have a thousand and one domestic servants at home. It is sheer ignorance to think that doing everything for your children is a mark of honour or a way of bequeathing royalty to them.
- Teach them to be useful and make their impact felt positive, wherever they are found, be it in the school, place of worship, in another person’s home, among others.
- Encourage your children to always leave a good impression wherever they go. Teach them to be courteous, respectful, friendly, cheerful and helpful.
- Teach them good toilet manners – they must know how to keep the toilet seat for the next user. Let them know that it is unacceptable to leave the bathroom floor and walls messed with soap, foam or any form of dirt after bathing.
- Teach your children the importance of taking good care of their body and their environment; whether they are at home or elsewhere. Remind them that responsible people don’t leave their rooms unkempt or their beds unmade when they get up in the morning. Also, teach them to bathe very well, smell nice always and spread their towel after use. It is unbearable to have a smelly young person around you; let them take care of their armpits, teeth, hair, and nails, among others.
- Teach your children to manage their used clothes and other personal belongings very well, whether in their homes or elsewhere. It can be irritating to have dirty clothes or shoes, especially those of a visitor litter at every corner of the house.
- Let them pack their toiletries before leaving home. Your children should not depend on their hosts for their basic toiletries like soap, deodorants, cream, toothpaste and other essentials.
- Teach your children to dress well all the time, especially when they are spending time with another family. You probably allow your daughters to dress in bum shorts and your sons to walk about with their chest bare in your home, but they may not be safe if they do so in another place. You may not know where a predator would lie in wait for a child.
- Teach them good table manners; not the ones recited in nursery school rhymes. Teach them to chew with their mouth covered, not to make noise with the cutlery on their teeth, not to talk with their mouth full, and not to eat and mess up the table or floor, among others.
- Let your children know that washing only their plates after eating is not a noble idea.
- Remind your children that jumping into a conversation when adults are talking is a sign of being ill-mannered. Discourage this both in your home and elsewhere.
- Help your children not to be social birds online and anti-social bugs offline. They should relate well with people around them, much more than they do with virtual folks they meet online. Please, discourage this idea of young people locking themselves in the room for hours on end without communicating with anyone in the house – all because they are on the phone.
- Empower your children to uphold your family values wherever they are. But before then, make sure that your family values are credible, empowering, socially and morally beneficial, and are well communicated to them.
- Teach your children to control their appetite and learn to turn down certain offers, even when such offers come from people they know. And at home, it is not compulsory that they must taste everything they see. This will help them to take their eyes away from certain things when they are in other people’s homes.
- Always remind your children that they are the window through which the world sees you. If your children’s behaviour outside is bad, the consensus is that they lack home training. And since children are not meant to give themselves home training, it means that you failed as a parent.
- Help you and the children, to be very useful to themselves and to others wherever they find themselves
- It’s very important to imbibe into your children positive character traits such as honesty, obedience, love, standing for the truth and always speaking the truth, forgiveness, respect, responsibility, patience, empathy, integrity, and generosity, among others.
- Help your child not to act on impulse.
- Encourage your child to think about the consequences of their decisions. Tell them little stories about situations they might face and talk about actions they might take, who might be affected by their actions, what might happen because of their actions and what the best action might be.
- Finally, make sure your children know God. Salvation is not hereditary. That you are godly or highly spiritual is not a guarantee that your children are saved. You must consciously and deliberately lead them to God.
As 21st-century parents, let us try our best to make sure these children represent us well. I am sure you will feel good to receive calls or messages from friends and families applauding you for your child’s good mannerisms after a short stay with them or if you come to your children’s school and people are pointing at you as the parent of the best-behaved child in the school. Won’t you?
Make sure your hosts and the hosts of your children are always impressed to have you and/or your children around.
A Time for Sober Reflection
- How well are you raising your children?
- Are you raising them to represent you well, bring your family glory or the other way round?
- Are you raising them to be useful for themselves now or later on in life regardless of where they found themselves?
- Are you raising them with the mentality that you suffered so much and you can’t allow any of your wards to go through the same cycle?
- Are you raising your children with the end in mind and ensuring they see the end from the beginning?
Wishing all the 21st-century parents of the world the very best in raising their children to be good ambassadors of their respective homes.
https://medium.com/horizon-hub/parenting-in-the-21st-century-challenges-and-joys-3f6edabd88ca
Raising 21st Century Children Beyond Your Niche As A Parent
