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Keep your children usefully occupied this school holiday
Concerns are growing over the safety and welfare of children during school holidays.
What you need to know:
- Parents find time for ‘chama’ meetings and hanging out with friends, drinking for hours, but many barely create time to bond with their children.
- Keep them busy by encouraging them to read books that are not school textbooks, pursue hobbies, do housework, youth activities, and sports such as football, swimming or skating.
Most Kenyan parents work hard to provide for their families. Many leave their homes at 6.00 a.m. or earlier, and return at 7.00 p.m. or later. During school holidays, children remain at home alone or with house-helps, spending the whole day relaxing, getting into mischief, playing games with friends, or bent over their phones or other gadgets. Somewhere along the way, neighbours start complaining and registering their displeasure at your teen’s behaviour, together with their peers in the neighbourhood.
Two weeks later, the teens are back in school, and soon after they reopen, the school principal summons the parent for an urgent meeting at the school. Your child, aged 14, has been accused of bullying schoolmates and was also caught with alcohol hidden in their suitcase. Eventually, the child is suspended for two weeks and sent home with their parent(s).
As a parent, you are left wondering how and when your obedient and pleasant child became a bully and began drinking alcohol. Then you realise that these days you barely spend time with your children. You leave very early in the mornings and return late in the evenings, feeling exhausted, and hardly engage in any conversations with your children. You go home and resolve to be stricter in your parenting.
Suddenly, your teenager, for the very first time in their life, feels very restricted and suffocated by rules. They do not understand why you have suddenly changed; they cannot leave the house freely to spend time with their friends. Their use of gadgets has been greatly controlled, and now you give them the phone for only two hours when you are present in the evening.
The relationship between you and your child begins to deteriorate because they fail to understand why you, as a parent, have suddenly become strict and quarrelsome, making life very difficult for them. When did things go wrong, and how can we as parents reorganise our lives to be more involved in raising our teens?
As a parent, you need to be hands-on and intentional. You need to provide structure in the daily lives of your children from a very young age so that even if they have to go out to work, the children’s days are planned. Children thrive where there is structure.
Have you ever wondered how schools can accommodate over 1,000 teenagers in one place and manage them through the days, weeks and months they are at school? It is because schools are operating on a structured schedule every single moment of the day. You may then wonder how to create structure for your children at home during the holidays.
Call a family meeting with your child(ren) and draw up a daily schedule of activities in the household. Assign duties to your children and other family members. Ensure that you, too, appear on the schedule for some of the activities. This makes the children feel that they are contributing towards the family’s welfare. The daily schedules should include household chores, study time, meals, hobbies, as well as relaxation. Ensure that the schedules are adhered to and that consequences are implemented when assignments are not done or completed on time.
Be intentional and spend quality time with your children. Parents find time for ‘chama’ meetings and hanging out with friends, drinking for hours, but many barely create time to bond with their children. Do not leave your children at home unsupervised because the effects of negative peer pressure are real.
Keep them busy by encouraging them to read books that are not school textbooks, pursue hobbies, do housework, youth activities, and sports such as football, swimming or skating. These are things that you should be able to follow up on by phone from wherever you are working.
Let us keep our teens usefully occupied during the holidays.
