$21,000 tuition is no substitute for hands-on parenting; a bitter lesson African parents must learn

 

Let’s start with the video.

A man is seen yelling at someone, his son, who is sitting, palpably contrite. At first, the man is simply yelling, demanding to know why his son hasn’t done well at school and then he proceeds, in a shocking sweep to slap the boy’s face. Someone else, a woman, recording the incident steps in and asks the man to stop. She asks in a plea that isn’t quite insistent enough to stop the man because he continues to hit his son. He does this while letting his son know of the exorbitant amounts of money he’s had to pay to keep him and his younger brother in school. He asks the son again, if he can not read, and just as the child is about to say something, he slaps him again. This is basically all there is to the video.

You can sum it up this way: a frustrated father physically abuses his son for not doing well at school.

This is typical. Relatable and traditional to the child-rearing cultures in many African households. And this is where Nigeria joins the conversation. Between thinking of children as repositories of our good deeds who must repay those deeds with obedience, subservience, intelligence, meekness, fear, quietness, but not too much, sharpness, but not too loud and forgetting to remember that the parents, not the children, chose to bring someone into the world, we have our fair share of this toxic, very toxic deal.

With the view of many Nigerians on corporal punishment changing constantly with the exposure of the trauma caused by the consequence of verbal, emotional and physical abuse masked as discipline, this video has caused a sizable amount of outrage on one part of the Twitter discourse panel and a truckload of justification via personal experiences, on the other.

If you speak on this to the average Nigerian who swears by physically and verbally bending their children to order, you will also learn of their own abuse. You will learn of the easy transference of aggression, frustration and pain they couldn’t have taken out on their parents, being meted out on their own children. You will ask them why these measures never work and you will meet dead ends and fall into fruitless trauma laden tunnels, sad, impractical and unnecessarily cruel.

This is an example.

Another one:

The fact that we as a people are insensitive to the huge effects of any type of abuse, especially one carried out by a parent in the guise of discipline or “training” on the development of a child and it wholesome existence as adults, speaks largely to the cultural reset we need to adopt as quickly as possible. It speaks to an existing culture of burying trauma so deep that we learn to live with it, to twist it on the head and make allowances for the people who brought them into our lives, mostly because interrogating and calling out that kind of injustice isn’t the most popular thing to do.

It is however, good to see people seeing the Nigerian, African brand of discipline as the sham that it is:

If we are ever going to raise children who wouldn’t have to spend a better half of their life in therapy or letting out their inherited trauma on their children, our country must adopt stronger child protection laws. We must integrate alternative means of discipline and prioritize considering the mental and social capability of raising a child over our ability to fulfill a harmful cultural demand.

We leave it here for now.

 

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