According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and World Health Organisation (WHO), a child can be defined as a person within the ages of 0-18 years. Children are our precious gift from God. We are therefore duty bound to train, educate and protect them from societal ills and the likes, most especially in our present day Nigeria because the moral decay in our contemporary society.
There are no any gifts from the parents to their children more precious than good training or morals. It is a divine instruction that parents should treat their children with love and sympathy also to share equal and the same type of gifts to their children both male and the female are the same. Parents should teach their children to be humble, kind, truthful, obedient, polite, and soft spoken and to behave well to everyone at all times.
Try not to allow your child to do anything without your permission or knowledge (in secret). As a parent, try to teach and encourage them to live in peace with everybody, especially with friends and neighbors. They should also learn to respect teachers and elders.
It is also a religious saying that parents should encourage their children to help the needy, poor, disabled and elderly people. It is a good habit to let your children know that they are not to enter houses, offices or rooms without permission even if they go to their father’s or mother’s room.
As a parent, you should be choosy or selective about the films they watch and the stories you tell them. Monitor your children computer use.
It is, of paramount important to cultivate reading and writing habit in the children both religious and western literature. The morals of love, Care of our children’s lives, upbringing and happiness and not their destruction is the first and the only legitimate objective of good parents.
As the saying goes “children are remarkable perceptive. Their eyes ever observe, their ears ever listen and their minds ever process the massages they absorb”. So direct them to the right path.
Parents should not punish their children unnecessarily. Do not make punishment a usual habit. Treating the child with kindness is the principle. Be reasonable and try to give the child a chance first of all, then a warning and then a rebuke etc. Use a very gradual process if you must punish. Never hit on the face or head as the religious injunction forbids this.
It is much better to earn children respect and love than to force them to unwillingly get it. Also, it is better for children to fear you out of the respect and love they have for you than for them to respect and love you out the fear they have for you. Try to be in love with the children but be firm when it is necessary to be so.
Never view your children only from the points of their weaknesses, differences or disadvantages. Give your children special or presidential treatment. Remember there will be a time you may be weak, fragile and vulnerable. There will come a time you could not do anything for yourself. They may patiently take care of you, endure your complaints and cries all the times, accommodate your foolishness, provide, protect and support you. Failure to train and take care, appreciates and reciprocate such deeds now, may be responsible for the many miseries you may see around you, (we pray not) bear in mind that “many people suffer in life not from lack of food, but from eating the wrong food.”
Learn what you need to know and do what you ought to do now. We must not only do the right things, we must do things right. Do not delay – start now.
Forgive the wrong or mistake they might have done in the past. Don’t bring yesterday’s miseries into today’s gladness. Don’t invite tomorrow’s worries into today’s joy. To be sincere you cannot afford to live your life in the past. Please don’t look back because those who turn back can never more forward.
As you read this piece you can believe with me that, there is no better by making a meaningful contribution to the lives of our children then now. We have to make the best opportunities we have to make tomorrow count. Yesterday opportunities have gone but I am assuring you that today brings a very fresh and new ones.
We have to do more to achieve higher degree on piety and spiritual up-liftmen in the same manner we expect our children to become divinely blessed, morally refined and sincerely closer to Almighty God than ever before. May God help us. Amen.
Adamu Muhd Usman, Kafin-Hausa, Jigawa State.
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