By Bob Kisiki
The A’level results were out, and Nambi’s son had passed with 16 points. Contrary to expectation based on precedence, they did not expect that the boy would qualify for a government scholarship, so they fell to applying for private courses in all major universities.
Yet, when the Makerere University admission lists came out, the boy (we shall call him Randy Bushara for functional purposes) had been granted a scholarship to pursue a course in the arts. Yet, while the mother celebrated this development, Randy did not. He said he wanted to become a journalist, and demanded that his mother pay for him privately, to pursue his dream.
Well, the mother asked the boy to fill in forms at two universities and submit them. And, bless the Lord, when results came out for one of the universities (a private one), Randy had been taken on for mass communication and journalism.
They asked all students who had been admitted to pay a commitment fee, and to prepare to begin the course on a given date. Nambi did all that dutifully. But know what? Randy insisted he did not want that university; he preferred Makerere. He said that had always been his dream, so he would wait for the admissions list there to come out. Finally, it did and he was not on it…
What would you do? How do you help such a child? Well, it’s not a bad thing having dreams. It’s what everybody tells us to do – dream, and dream big. So there was no way Randy’s mother could blame him for having desired to go to a university of his choice.
However, we cannot close our eyes to the facts: First, Randy had been admitted to a course on government funding; second — when he expressed the desire to do a different course than the one he had been offered, his mother accepted to let him apply for it at two different universities, one of which admitted him; and third — that when he was required to commence studies at the university where he had been admitted, he did not. He chose not to begin, preferring that he give Makerere a chance.
What does this engender for Randy? He must be allowed to take the consequences of his choices. This, mark you, is not punishment for having expressed his desires; it is a lesson in the age-old principle that for every action, there are consequences. We cannot be comfortable making specific choices but not want to reap the fruit thereof. It is the duty of every responsible, caring parent to allow their children eat the fruit of their decisions. To go all out to cushion them from these consequences is to deny them the opportunity to grow. Every time we make our bed, we should be willing to lie in it. When you get a child to become accustomed to having an easy way out of the repercussions of their decisions, you are essentially “helping” them to think that the world owes them, which is wrong. No, when they make choices, they should be ready to face the results of those choices.
The writer is a parenting counsellor and teacher
