PARENTING RIGHT
Organisation helps parents bring up their children properly
All it took was a harrowing experience this month in 2018 to arouse something in Tumelo and Leene to establish The Conscious Parent. This is an organisation that helps parents understand their role and effectively reduce power struggles in their homes by applying strategies that can help their troubled children to thrive.
That night, two young men broke into their house through a kitchen window, and proceeded to their bedroom where she and her husband were sleeping. They were told not to move or say anything, Leene narrates.
The young culprits had several knives on them and asked that all the children be summoned from their bedrooms to the main bedroom, where their parents were held hostage.
“One question came to my mind, these children were not born like this, they surely came innocent, who taught them that they could rob people in their houses, and how were they taught this,” Leene wondered.
It was then that she, a mother of four boys, was awakened to the fact that how children are raised, has an impact on how they turn out to be.
“Whether we know it or not, whether we are deliberate or not, we are crafting their mindset one way or the other. I looked at my boys who were helpless and thought about who I am raising them to become,” she said.
From that moment, Leene thought about raising children in consciousness and helping other parents do the same.
As a ‘boy-mom,’ Leene’s greatest desire is to raise her sons to be empowered responsible men who live true to who they are created to be.
“I want them to be able to lead their families, understand their duties as future husbands and fathers,” she said.
But what worries her is that there are a lot of social ills in which boys and men are the main perpetrators.
“You talk robbery, rape, murder, suicide, alcohol and substance abuse, violence in all its forms, even at schools, it is mostly boys or men”.
Her issue was whether there could be something in the way that boys are raised that makes them behave this way. Although she is raising boys, her experience - from a family of four girls - made her take notice of glaring differences between raising boys and girls.
She added that there are certain expectations and demands that are placed on the boy child as compared to the girl.
According to her, the most common being that boys are discouraged from crying and expressing their emotions as this is deemed as a sign of weakness.
“They are expected to be strong and firm and to handle any situation. In trying to encourage them to be resilient, we take away from them the natural expression of sadness, frustration, hurt and they end up bottling up such feelings and emotions for fear that they will not be man enough,” Leene said.
This in her view causes boys to bottle issues up which builds anger and bitterness. In addition, if they cannot meet the demands and expectations, they start having low self-esteem that also eventually develops into unacceptable behaviours. According to Leene, some of the common challenges that parents raising boys encounter are that in their nature, boys are more energetic than girls, as toddlers, boys are naughtier, they climb up things, and are a bit rough. Girls on the other hand are generally calmer gentler, and softer. “As they become teens, boys easily fall prey to influence of engaging in sex, alcohol and substance abuse by their peers and can become very defiant. They are vulnerable to depression and suicide,” Leene said. She added that they may also need to prove their manhood and find it difficult to say no to temptations and bad influences from their friends.
Leene emphasised the need for both parents to be active in the lives of their boys.
“I believe that since it takes a man and woman to form a child, it should take the same to raise one,” she said. Her view is that a boy child looks up to the father for mentorship, to teach him “men things”, and if that need is not met, they feel a void and it usually creates a lot of anger.
Her advice to women who are raising boys single-handedly is to find a father figure for their child, further explaining that this need was met in the old days because of the presence of uncles and grandfathers.
Morality has generally deteriorated, and some blame parents for not parenting their children. Leene, who is a John Maxwell certified parenting and family coach, believes that children’s bad behaviour is always associated with their parents or upbringing. For example, when a child misbehaves in the community, the first question that is usually asked is “ke ngwana wa ga mang yo!” and this is because it goes without saying that any behaviour that a child portrays good or bad - has a direct link to how that child was raised. Leene, also a chartered Accountant by profession with a Conscious parenting course by Dr. Shefali under her belt, said that parenting is a crucial aspect of the health of any society and the nation at large, therefore it cannot be left to chance. “Its negative impact can be felt not only in our homes, in schools but also in work places.”