Turn child-raising into child’s play

There are no gifts from parents to their children more precious than good training or morals. It is a divine instruction that parents should treat their children with love are and sympathy and to also share equal and the same type of gifts to their children both male and female. Parents should teach their children to be humble, kind, truthful, obedient, polite, 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. 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 admonition 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 are entering 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’s computer use. It is of paramount importance to cultivate a reading and writing habit in the children while encouraging the consumption of 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 remarkably perceptive. Their eyes ever observe, their ears ever listening and their minds ever processing the messages they absorb”. So, direct them on 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’s respect and love than to force them to unwillingly give 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 of 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 cannot 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, appreciate 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 move forward.

As you read this piece, you will agree with me that there is no better way to make meaningful contribution to the lives of our children than to start now. We have to make the best of the opportunities we have to make tomorrow count. Yesterday’s opportunities are gone but I am assuring you that today brings along with it fresh and better options.

We have to do more to achieve a higher degree of piety and spiritual up-liftment 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 wrote in from Kafin Hausa, Jigawa State