Lilian Fortune

         Have you ever aimlessly, intentionally or not, gone through your teenage child’s property and seen or identified something you feel that is wrong or does not sit right with you? At that moment, you have a lot going through your mind.

“Should I bring it up? Should I talk about it?” “Should I just act like I didn’t see it?”
“What if I talk about it and lose their trust?”
“What if I talk about it and they block me off from ever
figuring them out in the future?”

I must confess, parenting is a lot harder than it was while growing up. As an African woman, I grew up in an environment with everything figured out for me. You think you have it worse as a westerner? Try growing up as a woman in an African home; no CPS, no serious abuse laws, poor foster care facilities, bad healthcare. It was almost impossible to survive a beating from your parent and have the audacity to report them to a court or even the police or you might even get a whooping from the judge and the police; that’s how parenting was for me while growing up. There were so many things my make cousins could do and get away with but not me. In Africa, the daughter is the pride of every home. She showcases how good her family is. How she walks, talks, and Carries herself immediately informs everyone around her on the kind of parents her parents are. There was no room for having your own privacy, or being sneaky with it. You dare not yell at your parents for scolding you after going through your privacy and finding something they might have seen as embarrassing or bad enough to destroy the family’s name!

Back home, our parents could barely even care to talk to us about a mischievous text or letter they found hidden in our wardrobes, or the fact that they saw us talking to a boy in the streets, you’d be lucky to not get beaten to a pulp the moment a boy finds himself at your front door and tells your father that he came to see you. Hell! Would be better than the next three to four hours that would come right after. That is what some parents of today have gone through in their youth, the amount of abuse and tough parenting skills of their parents gave some of us no kind of closure with our parents and while some have chosen to rise above their pasts and be better parents to their children, some have categorised the methods of our parents back in the days to be the best in taming your teenager. Whip them when they keep things from you rather than try to find out why, ground then when they lie to you rather than talk them into knowing that they can trust you with the truth, and always trying to take away their space and their privacy. Yes, it might look like your technique is working but trust me, you are doing more harm than good to not only your relationship with your child, but their relationship to their external environment. Before you know it, they start to lie their way out of tough situations even with people they do not have to, they start to keep even bigger secrets but this time, more craftily so you don’t find out.

In as much as you would Favor the idea of being a parcel of your child’s life, it’s always advised that you do not force their trust, you earn it. What do you do when you find out some sort of information from their phones or personal items? How do you approach them in a way you don’t scare them? How do you tell them that it is right or wrong without first of all judging them? How do you correct them without making them feel bad about telling you the truth? How you pop the question to your teenagers matters a big deal and has a great influence on their ability to desire a change from their emotional and mental growth. Just like in the case of my daughter from the previous article, I would be sharing with you the best ways to pop the question to your teenager on our next piece