You can pay people to have children. Paying a person to properly raise a child is another story. The hard part of having a child is the child rearing. Even if all babies are created equally, all parents are not.
Not being able to pay the ejac-tax has landed many a man before the courts. It may not be a good idea to have children if you can’t pay courts: the fine or for the furniture. Yet how many great men and women were born to parents who struggled to maintain and raise them? The struggle may even have contributed to their greatness because it takes more than material things to raise a child.
You don’t have to hire purchase the latest crib, or a state-of-the-art stroller, or buy brand name baby formula. Skin-to-skin contact, loving eye contact, breast milk and stimulating time spent outdoors are some low cost ways to give your baby an early boost. These are some fundamentals in raising up a child in the way it should grow. These things take time and commitment more so than money. Time and commitment that may be lacking if you feel nuh pickney nah hold yuh down.
Is this a commonly held attitude? What is our parenting culture? Some children are raised. Many in our society just grow up. If a parent is negligent it doesn’t mean the child is doomed. God is good. But as the Muslim saying goes, “Trust in Allah, but tie your camel”.
Once upon a time, it was safer to let your child grow wild. You had a good idea of what they would be getting into and the influences they would come under. A child unparented was parented by the community. These days are not so simple. A parent today interested in raising their child has to have a hawk’s eye and a hound’s nose. There are a lot more traps for a wandering child.
Let’s not fool ourselves. A child has a mind of its own from the womb. If you doubt me, ask a pregnant woman if she can make her baby stop kicking. Yet some have the belief that they can and must control their child. We can barely control ourselves. It might be wiser and more reasonable to tell yourself you will try to influence your child in as positive a direction as possible. The idea of control is delusional. If they do what you say it is because they choose to and any honest parent will tell you that many times they don’t.
Parenting strategies
There are many strategies of influence you can use to raise your child. Fear and intimidation, otherwise known as corporal punishment is one. It should be the last, last resort. With enough early diligence, and parental self-discipline it may even be unecessary in most cases. But as we said, raising a child is not an exact science. There is no universally infallible formula. Best practices are circumstantial. There are too many variables and unknowns. Even with a parent’s best efforts, the child’s future is in their own and their Almighty’s hands.
Nevertheless, a good parent wants to do the best they know. The best we know comes from two sources; what we’ve lived and what we’ve learnt. In other words, our experience and our education, or the culture we’ve been born into and the one adopted.
Born into a post-colonial, just-a-few-generations-out-of-slavery-culture, it is only to be expected that fear and intimidation would be a popular parenting strategy. It is what we lived. It is what we learned. People are slow to change; culture even slower. Education takes time to take root; sometimes generations. There is a process of making what you know become who you are.
Helping parents
In a serious post-colonial, just-a-few-generations-out-of-slavery-culture educating parents should be a major priority. In the reality of today’s political environment, things which should be priorities may be put on the back burner if they don’t have immediate economic or political benefits. And if controlling a child is hard, try controlling a parent.
We are learning as we go along, slowly trying to build a sustainable parenting culture, from the best our parents had to offer and the best we have observed from other cultures, experimenting along the way to adapt the methods we adopt to suit our needs. Progress will not be a smooth straight line. It hardly ever is. Our children often thrive in spite of us as opposed to because of us.
Many parents need help. It is not always wilful negligence. Having to struggle to feed your children can take time and energy away from the more intangible areas of child rearing. It would be wise for the system of education to take into consideration the underparented child. Reading, writing and arithmatic cannot be all. School is a poor substitute for a good parent. But there are enough under-parented children that it needs to be some sort of substitute.
Realising the need to help parents raise their children, the education system would focus more on early childhood education. The first seven years of life are said to be when most of the raising is accomplished. After that it is really just maintainance, or unfortunately in many cases, damage control.
More six forms is wonderful, but without the proper early educational system it may be building on a haky foundation.
Adrian Green is a creative communications specialist.
Email: [email protected]
