THE ABSOLUTE DILEMMA OF PARENTING
Except you want to live a celibacy kind of life; maybe not celibacy, but you chose to be unjust to the ones that brought you to this life by not having children, you decide not to reciprocate the favour of bringing you to this life by doing the same, you say you want to reduce earth’s population, then you definitely will be faced with this dilemma.

As a parent, you are to be the closest role model your children should ever know. Forget our fantasies of choosing some distant ‘role models’. We get embedded by a very large percentage of the qualities our parents possess. We consciously or subconsciously look out for qualities in them and also consciously or subconsciously model our lives after them. This makes having a good personality as parents the best a child could ever get from them.

But the problem herein is, parents just like humans in general, are not perfect! Now, by not being perfect does not necessarily mean that you won’t know that your bad qualities are actually bad qualities (at least for a right thinking person). You will most likely know that these bad qualities are qualities that you actually have to do away with but the reality here is that you can do away with them entirely. Your human nature still makes you commit these errors many times without count, whether consciously or subconsciously. And that is even for acts that we even have as ‘bad qualities’. Many a time, we still commit errors that are not in our habit to commit.

Now, the dilemma in all of these is that, as you are committing these ‘sins’, your wards are watching very closely more that you think that they are. And this is even worse if you are of the nagging type. You immediately look like Lucifer trying to preach the Gospel. More so, as a parent, you find it obligatory to correct the wrong deeds your wards commit. And you even end up correcting the ones you commit yourself because you just have to if you don’t want to raise rotten tomatoes. So, at different point in time, the fact that you commit such errors becomes an obstacle for you wards to take correction of some errors. At least, not until they attain the maturity of realizing that even parents are not supposed to be perfect human beings but they still want the best human qualities for the children. So they would be like, ‘you’re also guilty of the same thing you were correcting me of’. Of course, they might not say it out loud, but the feeling would definitely be there. And this becomes a problem that remains in a family up until the child is matured enough to understand that parents are not supposed to be perfect beings.

But then, this dilemma is better than having a bad personality or saying you would not correct your children so as not to look like some hypocrite. The menace in the society today requires a heavy revival of the sanctity of what a family should look like and that begins with me and you. That remains the only way to achieve the sanity we desire in our world today.

Gafar Oluwatosin Bashiru
tosin_bashiru2000@yahoo.com
05/10/2016

cc lalasticlala