By Bob Kisiki
Admit it, the children were away from school way too long. Much too long. And in all that time, we cannot keep our heads in the lulling sand of consolation thinking nothing changed, yet we know that the one thing necessary for change to occur has been happening all along – time.
Time does change things and, yes, our children — though I shall not call them things — too, obey the law of change. When time happens to them, they do change. And in all the while they kept out of school, time — nature’s main agent — acted upon them and they changed.
They grew — numerically, so those who had been toddlers became infants and infants pre-teens. Pre-teens grew into adolescents and adolescents into young adults.
They grew mentally, realising that under certain circumstances, particular things cease to be and others take over; they even grew intrinsically… they all grew.
Hormones acted upon them. Society impressed upon them certain things. Peers and home influences; the demands of life – nature and nurture. Plainly, your child changed.
What does all this mean, therefore? It means that merely paying fees, buying what they require for class and the dormitory and driving them to school is not the end of the story.
That is just the beginning of the story for you, in what you will realise is going to be a really long time. Let me explain.
Did you hear about the unfortunate incidents where two children took their lives over a change of school? Did you read what I just wrote – change of school! How often do children change school? And when did you last hear that a child, whose parents had moved her to another school, had committed suicide? Probably never.
Now that is exactly what I am saying: Something has changed. Something big that needs fixing, or else we are faced with a huge snag.
A child who commits suicide because they were moved to another school is not clamouring to return to their previous school, no. They are saying there is a deep-seated need on the inside that they want you to take care of, but which you are either unaware of or you are simply glossing over. This calls for an in-depth study of the predicament we are faced with.
And it is this, friends: That we are charged with parenting a generation that is facing situations no one has gone through in living memory. Not even our grandparents faced this plight. People have been in and out of school before, but they always had a hand in it – either as the children themselves or as a family.
Not now. Not with our children. It is totally out of their hands and their parents’, which is scary! Even as they went back to school, you could see they were not convinced; they are not sure they will last there. And who can blame them?
This is why we must be ready to make several trips to school, make calls through teachers or other staff we can befriend there, and keep helping our children adjust.
We have grown accustomed to using words like stressed and traumatised wantonly, but now here is a situation where our children are facing those two “for real”.
We should join hands with their teachers to see that this entire generation does not go to waste.
The writer is a parenting counsellor and a teacher
