Sunday, June 30, 2013
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While growing up as a child, whenever I and my siblings ask of cash for one thing or the order from my dad, what we get is “I don’t have money”, even when our demands are granted, it’s always some percentage short of our demands, no thanks to the harsh Nigerian economy. But when such demands are made to our mum, she takes her time to make us see reasons why she can’t grant us our desires for now or in the future, that’s if we are not getting it. With this variance, despite being a child, I had the notion that my dad was lying, so we had to look for an avenue to outwit him.
In our world today most of us as parents still find it difficult to concur with the fact that the curiosity level in our kids has taken a geometric progression and they (kids) are searching for avenue(s) to douse this curiosity and God save you if you feed them with wrong information.
I visited a friend who is a pastor over the weekend and while we were doing the chit chat in company of his six year old son, he (my friend) asked me to accompany him to the hospital to see a colleague whose wife gave birth through Caesarian section and before I could give a reply if I would be going or not, his kid asked, “what is a Caesarian section?” To be honest, time stood still for me when his dad gave me a ‘to and fro’ look. How would you explain to a child what a Caesarian section is without being explicit for his age? Well, one answer led to another question and a “child birth lesson” was explained to a six years child.
When I got home at the end of the day, I tried to reminisce over the entire episode all over again. What kept nagging for answers in between my ear lobes was “did my friend do the right thing by answering his son’s question or not?”
I guess I would not be far from the truth to say that most adults today had displaced childhood with lies (lie in this article means the more subtle ways we mislead our kids) we were made to believe only to find out that such stories were cock and bull stories. Did I hear someone say that’s the fun of childhood? Well, if that’s what you think, so be it, but how would you feel when your little innocent child goes out exploring only to find out that in trying to shield him/her, you have been feeding him/her with false answers to questions he/she asked you.
Am not trying to defend if we should lie to our kids or not, no. All am saying is that, we should examine which lies we tell and why. But thinking deep into the box, we would find out that alot of the things we as parents conceal from our kids are done out of fright of the unknown. Besides, some lies we were told as kids would and still affect us as adults.
If you ask the average parent why they lie to their kids, the most common reason they would give is that they do so to protect them. Honestly speaking, it seems so obvious and certainly not a bad lie to tell in giving the innocent child the impression that the world is quiet, warm and safe. But this harmless type of lie can turn sour if left unexamined.
Paradoxically speaking, imagine trying to keep someone in a protected environment as a newborn till age 18. To mislead someone so grossly about the world would seem not protection but abuse.
Lies about sex are another story entirely. Why not tell the child the facts of the issue as against him/her grappling in the dark for answers? Parents know they\'ve concealed the facts about sex, and many at some point sit their kids down and explain more. But a host of others fail to bridge this gap in telling their kids the difference between the real world and the cocoon they grew up in. This in combination with the confidence parents try to instill in kids and what you get every year is a new crop of 18 year olds who think they know how to run the world.
As a kid during my adolescent age, I felt I knew it more than my parent especially when they tried drumming in between my lobes what and what not to do.
On the issue of sex, generally speaking, reasons parents don\'t want their kids having sex are complex aside from the obvious dangers which include pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But those aren\'t the only reasons parents don\'t want their kids having sex. The average parents would hate the idea of their wards having sex even if there were zero risk of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases.
Kids can probably sense they aren\'t being told the whole story about it. After all, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are just as much a problem for adults, and they have sex.
What really bothers parents about their teenage kids having sex? Their dislike of the idea is so visceral it\'s probably inborn. But if it\'s inborn it should be universal, and there are plenty of societies where parents don\'t mind if their teenage kids have sex—indeed, where it\'s normal for 14 year olds to become mothers. So what\'s going on? There does seem to be a universal taboo against sex with prepubescent children. One can imagine evolutionary reasons for that. And I think this is the main reason parents in industrialized societies dislike teenage kids having sex. They still think of them as children, even though biologically they\'re not, so the taboo against child sex still has force.
Even though the lies we tell our kids are probably not quite as harmless as we think, in the Nigerian society, our kids are our future, pension and gratuity. What we feed in between their ears today would be our big banks for resources when we are all feeble and wobbled with old age. If you look at what adults told children in the past, it\'s shocking how much they lied to them. Like us, they did it with the best intentions. So if we think we\'re as open as one could reasonably be with children, we\'re probably fooling ourselves. It’s high time we check ourselves before we wreck ourselves.
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