Mr.Akinropo Akinola is a lead researcher at a Nigerian Parenting Academy. He says that parenting must be intentional and purposeful. In this interview with OLUWATOSIN OMONIYI, he tasks young parents to attend parenting classes and stresses the need for parents, old and new, to create a family-creed value system that would help children and youths to withstand external influences
What do you have to say to the mentality that girls are supposed to be more morally upright than boys?
We have been made to believe that women are meant to be in the kitchen while men are meant to be outs i d e t h e kitchen while doing something else. That angle is taken from old clichés or research that says women are emotional while men are logical. The research came at that time because men used to go to war; for them to be at the warfront, logic is required, while women are meant to be at the home front, taking care of the home and children and prepare the spoils of the war. For women to do that, they had to be compartmentalized like you mentioned earlier. They needed emotional resilience on how to juggle things, and they needed skills, which was fine at that time. But now, men don’t go to war, and women do not necessarily have to be sitting at home again. They now go to work. The old cliché won’t work again. That is why we have to train our boys to be useful in many areas. I was discussing with a man who said he detests the heat of the kitchen. I told him if he detests the heat of the kitchen, there should be other areas where he should be able to help his wife, like cleaning of the house, washing of clothes and going to the market, among other things. The main purpose is to change the narrative that certain house chores are meant for women while others are meant for men. Let’s raise wholesome adults in our children, so that when they face any challenge, they will be able to surmount it. There is a man I counseled because he was having issues with his wife- an emotional connection problem. The man was trained on how t o m o p , wash, clean, and lay the bed, which he does perfectly well. The training still follows the old trend. So, the man doesn’t know how to cook, but the wife needs someone who can cook, someone who can complement her in the kitchen because the wife works too. So, they were not connecting in that area. As I was trying to let the wife understand that she should allow the man to handle what he knows how to do best, the man agreed to learn how to cook if the woman would teach him.
Will the man always be in the kitchen with her?
Naturally, a woman is wired to be more kitchen competent than a man? What the woman wants is someone who will be able to cook if there is a need for her to work late at the office.
Is this about modernism or following things the way they should be?
This is not about modernism or following things the way they should be. The important thing is about respecting each other, supporting one another, and loving each other. No rule, culture, or tradition should be allowed to make a man or woman a slave in a marriage. From what we were discussing earlier, the husband agreed to learn how to cook.
Can the husband sustain that?
When the couple’s love languages were assessed, acts of service came out on top for the woman. If that is her love language and the husband wants to connect with her and get the best of the wife at that emotional level, there shouldn’t be any problem with that. If he truly wants to unlock that emotional connection, he has to do that even if it’s two hours a week, because the husband has done everything to make that connection with the wife but it wasn’t working.
What can you say about today’s type of parenting, whereby children are mothering children?
The dynamics of today’s parenting keep changing and they will always be. The reason is that generations keep evolving. The crops of ‘Generation Z’ are still at the infant level; they are the ‘Alpha’ Generation from 2017 to date and they are still crawling but they seem to know more. The advice I always give parents is that the purpose of parenting is the same, but the method will never be the same. From time immemorial, the purpose has always been the same, which is to raise an adjusted adult in them but the method and how to achieve this may not be the same with regards to the environment and experience of the parent. Studies reveal that Generation Z and Alpha Generations are EPIC generations, and they are broken into four behavioural stages: E stands for experiential learning; they want to experience what you are saying, not just control and give them instructions. They want to see you doing what you are asking them to do. If I had wanted to train my child the way I was raised, by beating the child to do some certain chores, he/she would certainly do it at that time because of cane, but when the child starts having his own family, he will confine his wife to the kitchen. From what he said, I have never seen my father in the kitchen and the vicious cycle continues. That is what experiential means. P stands for Participatory. They want to participate in that disciplinary measure, they want to participate in the instruction, they want to participate in what governs the home and does this play out? For instance, the Bible, which is a book of divine instruction given to us by God, was initially in the King James Version but lately, there have been many other versions, like the New Living Translation and Revised Standard. All these other versions maintain the same meaning as the King James but the English was made simple so that everybody will be able to understand better. This also goes for our children. Whenever we are making rules and regulations at home, do we at times seek their consent or opinion about them? This is not to say parents are relinquishing their authority for the children to decide. We also preach that before couples start having children, that they should have a family constitution that governs them like what are things they would want to do, the number of the children they would want to have, the school they will love their children to attend, how they would want them to behave and the plans for the children. Family systems govern the home. One of them is the communication system, which points to how individuals will be addressed in the home. That perspective of the communication system defines what is called the perceptual code, which means what the name the family wants to be known for, what the family stands for. There are many families in Nigeria today and wherever the family names are mentioned; there are standards for those families. For instance, if a family wants to be addressed as a diplomat, every child that comes out of that family must conduct themselves as one. There are things you cannot do to a diplomat, you cannot curse, shout or beat a diplomat, a diplomat father doesn’t curse a diplomat’s mother and you don’t bring down the morale of a diplomat child as a mother. So, the level of conversation will determine how a child will be raised. As parents start having and raising children in that home, they bring to their consciousness who they are. There must be value-creeds in one corner of your home and as children are growing, those value creeds must be inculcated into them and that is what we call Participatory. I stand for Image-driven. 95% of this generation understands through pictures. We usually tell parents to speak less while they use more images. For instance, mentioning an elephant to them, they will not see it in the reality of e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t but see it through the eyes of a huge-grey animal. So, we use an image to teach. There is this metaphor I devised; it is either you are thermometer or thermostat and as a thermostat, it sets the temperature of a particular environment while thermometer reflects the temperature of the environment. What this means is that they should not be individuals that would just go with the flow either right or wrong but they should attempt to set their values. When children start growing into a world that is unknown to them which comes with a lot of drama, value system and sexual orientation, some of them tend to just flow along but when a child remembers that, I am a thermostat not a thermometer, he/she tends to stand out regardless of what is happening in the environment. That is why I like Hilary Clinton’s say that; ‘It Takes a Village to Raise a Child’. From the book, she said it is not about how good I raise my children but how best the children out there are raised. There is no child or family that is insusceptible from the larger influence from the society. So, our children are being brought into a corrupt environment which are beyond our control but little we can do is to set the value from home with which they will be able to sustain themselves in the corrupt society. The last one is C – Connection. They want to connect and 95 per cent of them use social media like TikTok and Snapchat to connect. Some parents usually argue that they are always with children, which is not enough for them to connect and bond with their children. The truth is they might be with the children all the time but they are not connecting with the right knowledge. If the children know more than the parents; they are not connecting with them. It is even when they respect us, they would ask questions because Google is there to answer all the questions they want answers to. I always tell parents that they don’t need hours to connect with their children, they just need to know when the children are being receptive. We had a problem connecting with my daughter for so many years until she was almost 14 years old. She came into the study room where I was writing, I would not have listened to her because I didn’t want to lose my line of thought that day but my instinct cautioned me to listen to what she had to say and I allowed her and she said that marriage is no longer desirable among her generation! I asked her the reason for that perception. She had a conversation about marriage with her friends and the various happenings in marriages, which are not giving them the right perspective about marriage, ranging from divorce, separation and domestic violence. We also had a discussion on why her virginity has to be kept until marriage. After the conversation, she told me that if I had started the conversation from the standpoint of the Bible, she would have lost interest in whatever I was saying because there are some Christians who once had terrible sexual lives and at the end of it, God still accepted them back. What do you say about bullying that is becoming more pronounced, especially among young teenagers? It seems supported by immediate family backgrounds. Bullying among young teenagers has been a serious issue that requires concerted efforts and immediate attention and action. I will suggest a few interventions I have suggested in many fora that stakeholders can apply. 1. I think education and Awareness about the impact of bullying and its attendant effect on the mental and emotional health and well-being of young teenagers are not strong enough because I know if it is, it can help society understand the consequences and also help them develop empathy towards peers. 2. Also the Implementation of anti-bullying Policies has been handled so far with kid gloves. Schools should have clear antibullying policies in place. Even some of them who have, the wherewithal to enforce the policy is at times not there. The policies as they are should outline the steps for reporting bullying, the consequences for bullies, and the support available for affected teenagers and the bullies. Not the affected teenagers alone. 3.We don’t have the agents of socialization around the child endeavour to encourage positive behaviour and respect among students. In some schools, senior prefects are given unhindered access to punish erring students anyhow without a recourse to being called to order by the administration. Schools should have programs that promote effective discipline, kindness, teamwork
What would you say about the effect of technology on parenting and children?
The effect of technology is simple. Technology must not replace parenting; whenever information is put out, there is always an agenda to control the narrative. For instance, if they ask questions from Artificial Intelligence (AI), it will only give them what has been programmed into it, especially sexual orientation and identity. Technology will not tell you your gender; it will tell you that you are at liberty to be who you want to be. That is why technology and ChatGPT AI will always talk about diversity and inclusivity and if care is not taken, we will propagate their narratives.
How do you beat this narrative because technology has taken over our children?
The way to beat that game is for us to be present and being present means looking for the time they will be receptive to us. As I said earlier, it took us many years to know what time to connect with our children, especially my daughter. We discovered the time she is receptive to us is around midnight. At times, whenever I walked along her door and heard any sound from her room and discovered she was awake, I would use that opportunity to connect with her. We would chat and watch movies, but despite that, she would still wake up early to go to school. She loved that moment and as parents, we locked into it. Parents must be able to find out the most receptive moment for the children. My son is not like that. How I connect with my son is that when we go on a ride and gist, he just open up everything. Parents usually think weekends are the best time to connect with their children because of their work schedule.
Aside technological influence, we now see as low as a nine-year-olds already into drug abuse — Is it a result of failed parenting or peer group influence?
