On Thursday this week, a colleague, Munyao Mutinda, lamented on Facebook about how it pains him when he sees his children throwing away half-used biros, rubbers, rulers and exercise books, yet when he was a young boy, these are items he had to borrow.
By the way, if you’re an active user of Facebook and all your friends are on this platform, you can’t claim to be young, you can only be optimistic and proclaim that you’re young at heart. But that was a ‘by the way’.
Anyway, I commented on this colleague’s post, informing him that he shouldn’t even think of telling his children his ‘woiyee’ story about how he grew up in great deprivation, in untold poverty, such that he walked 20 kilometers to and from school through a forest full of marauding lions, hyenas and cannibals, and with no shoes or sweater for that matter, even during the month of July, which is our winter, because his parents were poor. I informed him that his children would not be moved, and he would end up feeling worse.
And I was talking from an informed point of view. Many times, I have given my children my growing up story, the aim to inspire them to step up and do better since they are immensely privileged, unlike me at their age, yet each time they have given me a bored look.
A look that wonders why I am recounting stories that happened donkey years ago and which are unimpressive, if not made up. Each time this happened, I would get agitated because I expected them to be moved, to actually look around and acknowledge and appreciate the advantages they were growing up with and maybe start putting in more effort in school or stop sulking whenever I asked them to do simple chores around the house.
“Do you know I used to milk a cow, shovel the muck and feed the cow early in the morning before I went to school?!” I once scolded my teenage son when he showed reluctance to clean and tidy up his room.
If unimpressed was a person, I had finally met him, because he was standing there, right before me. The boy was unshaken and looked at me as if I was unhinged, and since he has a sense of humour, he asked me, deadpan, whether I was also always “number one” in school like all parents claimed. Dear fellow parent, how would you react to that? We eventually laughed about it, and he eventually cleaned up, but his point had been delivered.
Anyway, my point is that our stories of childhood hardship will never have any real impact on our young children, simply because they cannot relate to them or the times we lived in. Many of them have always had shoes, go to school in a vehicle, public or private, saving them having to take a short cut through the scary forest you keep referring to. You get the idea.
To them, your story is simply the stuff movies are made of. They might be amused, horrified even, but chances are that these stories will not inspire them to stop taking what they have for granted, for instance. What will work is using examples they see every day, examples they can relate to, and also setting good examples for them to ape.
