By Robert Clements
Invest in Your Children..!
Today’s the day of the career dad and mom! Both work, both sometimes earn equal salaries, and both spend long hours away from home.
“Why do you work such long hours?” I ask.
“Bob, I want my kids to have a better life than I did,” is the reply I get most often.
Let me tell you the story of a young lad called, ‘Johnny the weasel!’
Johnny is fifteen years old, the second youngest in a family of three. He grew up in a large urban area. Johnny is one of those kids who has a room for himself, and most of the things money can buy, because there’s enough money to buy all he wants.
But at fourteen he was into housebreaking. As he was small and able to squeeze into small spaces the gang to which he belonged called him, ‘the Weasel!’
Next it was into drinking and then into the joy of riding in stolen cars and soon he was well known to the juvenile court and was sent to the reformatory for six months.
His mother and father took time off from their busy schedules to attend the court hearings and pictures in the local papers showed them shocked and angry, “We gave him everything money could buy!” they exclaimed, “We’ve been working our backsides off so that he and his siblings have everything! Why did he do this?”
A block away a new centre was opened by the authorities, it was designed for youngsters who were becoming hardened with crime, here, a team of professionals started studying Johnny, there was a nurse, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a welfare officer, a house father, a house mother and so on.
They spend forty thousand pounds to keep him there. What they found was that if the father and mother had shared a little of the time they had for their jobs with Johnny, if they had been able to give him the love he was looking for, he wouldn’t have grown up with the feeling of rejection, trying to get acceptance from the gang of wrong company he’d walked into.
I see this happening more and more in our developing nation and in households where money becomes the main objective. Sometimes it could also be time spent at parties, instead of with your children, wining and dining rather than putting them to sleep with bedtime stories.
And then the children are compensated with toys, games, later fast cars and faster motorbikes and one night when they do something illegal, or parents find they’re into drugs, they cry in disbelief, “How could they do this to us?”
Ask instead, “How could you have done this to them?”
Invest in your children, not just your money, but your time! I remember, many, many years ago, a school down the road asked me if I would address parents on how to bring up children! Now those were years when I was more a writer than a public speaker and for a few moments pondered and asked myself as to how I’d been selected for the job, wondering if it had anything to do with bringing up two daughters, who I have little doubt would have laughed if they’d known their dad thought he’d become proficient in a subject they still considered me a novice!
But it made me do a lot of thinking and something I realized at the end of gathering material for the talk was that unlike any other job on earth parenting is something which we are thrown into as fathers and mothers with no knowledge of what we are supposed to do.
Like Julie Andrews in ‘The Sound of Music,’ our refrain could be, “Totally unprepared am I!” Oh yes, totally unprepared our we with most probably the greatest responsibility on earth. Scary isn’t it?
Very often I’ve heard people talk about their terrible childhood and when I talk to their parents I’m told how those same parents invested time and money, love and affection to bring up their children.
So what went wrong?
A small survey was done on children in which they listed ten qualities they wanted in parents. These young people, from 24 countries, agreed on these traits they believed were important for all parents to possess.
Here they are:
1. They want harmony. They do not want their parents to have unresolved and destructive conflict in front of them.
2. They want love. They wish to be treated with the same affection as other children in the family.
3. They want honesty. And to be told the truth.
4. They want acceptance. They desire mutual tolerance from both parents.
5. They want their parents to like their friends. They want their friends to be welcomed in the home.
6. They want closeness. They desire comradeship with their parents.
7. They want their parents to pay attention to them and answer their questions.
8. They want consideration from their parents. They do not want to be embarrassed or punished in front of friends.
9. They want positive support. They wish for their parents to concentrate on their good points rather than their weaknesses.
10. They want consistency. They desire parents to be constant in their affections and moods.
It appears that these children want what all of us want – respect, consideration and love. In fact, these work well with “children” of all ages.
Let’s give these ten points a go, shall we?
There’s a big thought I want to leave with you before I close: As we see the turmoil and the quick exit of the prime minister in Bangladesh, let’s realise that those behind it were students. Yes, it was teenagers and maybe those who were just past being children who rebelled against what they felt was injustice, and authoritarianism.
We don’t want that anywhere else, do we? So let’s start paying attention to our children before they react and respond in ways that are hardly peaceful..!
The Author conducts an Online Writers and Speakers Course. For more details send a thumbs-up to him on WhatsApp 9892572883 or [email protected]