This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper, Tanzania on 18th July, 2023.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘parenting’ as ‘The raising of children and all the responsibilities and activities that are involved in it.’ Encyclopaedia Britannica is more elaborate, explaining it as ‘The process of raising children and providing them with protection and care in order to ensure their healthy development into adulthood.’ For purposes of appositeness, in these critical and timely discourses, it is crucial to get the standard definitions in place.
Traditionally, parents and guardians have moral responsibilities to support, protect, provide for, and correct the children under their care, with the goal of helping them develop healthily into their adulthood. This ideal is still in place, though in practice it lingers delicately, as parenting generally becomes more and more lenient by the day.
The dark side of leniency is that it covers for wrongs and almost justifies them. It also takes away the fear of responsibilities that comes with wrongdoing. When one knows that there are no consequences regardless of what he or she does, chances are that one becomes careless and rigid. This is a structural setback for a child’s progressive growth into mature and responsible personhood.
There are campaigns of all kinds around us regarding parenting. Some issues that are being spoken against are rightly wrong and out of place. Among these are issues of abuse, physical and mental torture, corporal punishment and harassment, denial of basic sustenance, denial of the child’s rights, and subjection to harmful cultural practices. These should rightly be spoken against.
However, we need to reverse advocacy on the role of parents, guardians, teachers and other adults to correct children when they do wrong. Two decades ago, parenting was collaborative.
All adults shared the responsibilities of parenting, and one could correct a child, and the correction will be as valid and serious as if it was done by one’s own parent or guardian. This is not advocacy to go back to the past, but the past is evidently a corroborative reference point in this context.
The opposite of lenient parenting is that which upholds healthier and more productive goals first. For instance, teaching the child morals and self-discipline. For example, not allowing a child to be abusive, or lazy and idle, so that he or she does not get to be despised and hated, and does not become obese or develop physical health conditions out of carelessness.
Similar to that is parenting which diversifies the child’s experiences such that he or she grows up with a sense of self-awareness, dignity, boundaries, innovativeness, awareness of the future, and creativity. This can be done by committing him or her to learning new things for which he or she is constantly accountable.
Another extreme of it is where the parents are uninvolved in the actual parenting. Though they provide the needs and ensure the well-being of the children, they do not really know what their children think about, what they learn, what they like, and what they desire about their future. This happens when parents are too busy with their jobs and engagements away from home.
Thinking about a heartbreaking practical experience, there are modern children who grow up to 10 years of age or more who do not understand that money is worked for and is worth saving. This is because parents have made it look so easy.
As such, they develop a propensity to easily spend money than to earn it. Here there is a danger that they later live to spend more than they can earn. When they become adults and taste the hustle (‘joto ya jiwe’ – as we say in Kiswahili) of earning by themselves, it becomes difficult and they drift into easier, less demanding, and riskier ways to get money.
While I do not intend to glorify pain, it has its place in life. There is a time when we learn and are transformed through painful situations, for example being denied the things we want, being made to do things we do not want to do which are good for us, and being corrected frankly and truthfully in order to grow.
It is important that parents, from the time when the child is young, establish their irreplaceable position to give instruction and to take control. This way so much harm can be prevented in the future when critical decisions are to be made.
A child cannot be right all the time. This does not mean being authoritative; and still, it does not mean being overly permissive. In our society, we need substantial and substantive advocacy for what should be expected from the child.
In different cultures, parenting takes different shapes, but there is a challenge all around the world. This is partly influenced by modern approaches to life and the popular culture.
Care should be taken so that children, upon transcending to adulthood, are guided to make good and meaningful decisions about their life. The modern world offers so much in the names of internationality, interculturality, lifestyles, trends, and many others. Some of these should be approached critically without leniency.
