By Bob Kisiki
Woe is you when your child, as they report to boarding school or, especially, university or college, they do so as one getting into social asylum.
There are homes we subject children to, so that they end up living for the opportunity to step away even for a moment; sometimes even longing for that one day the Grace will hold their weary hand and lead them away from home for a long spell. Home needs to be homely to and for your children.
It is funny about children. From the day the mother goes in grunting, profusely sweating and insanely painful labour, and ultimately getting that baby they fall short of building an altar to just so they can keep worshipping it; to the day you realise this child is now only yours because they are your relative, just like all the rest of them living out there, all it takes is but a moment and a half, and you are alone yet again!
First, whoever notices children grow? People think death is a mystery; show me a deeper, more confusing mystery than the one of how children grow and grow up, even when they are always right under our very noses. Doesn’t it seem to you like each time you blink, children grab the chance to grow an inch taller and an ounce bigger; and each time you say a word in their presence, they learn ten! So while we are there doting on them; dressing them up like national trophies and feeding them like special experiments, before we know it, it is time to release them into the open world, for which we have actually been grooming them all along. So really, you don’t want to raise a child who won’t pack their final bag in glee and relief, instead of packing it, then refusing to put it in the car boot, because, as they will say leaning on your warm shoulder, “Please don’t let me leave home, daddy!”
The time to work for their fortnightly drive home for a fond weekend of long chats and wild stories about wherever they are, is now, as you find better ways to sort out your unceasing wars with each other as parents, than growling at her even as she screams at you.
You are really better off with children for whom home is the entire world, than making the rest of the world home to them. And the time to create that is now, while they are yet in your hands.
The writer is a parenting counselor and teacher
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