CONTINUOUS DETOXIFICATION AND RECALIBRATION, A MUST ‘Femi Adekunle on Parenting
CONTINUOUS DETOXIFICATION AND RECALIBRATION, A MUST
‘Femi Adekunle on Parenting
Years ago when my daughter was a toddler, we enrolled her in a kindergarten school. One day she came home and asked ‘mummy, is it el-u, em-u, en-u’? At first it was a puzzle to us and she struggled to explain what her class teacher taught her. This was it: we discovered that while teaching the pupils the English language alphabets, her class teacher, from the eastern part of the country, was heavily accented and wrongly pronounced l, m, n as el-u, em-u, en-u …. Fortunately, my daughter had at home audio and visual teaching aids that conflicted with her teacher’s pronunciation. This for us, was serious enough to change her school and that was what we did.
If the above sounds too simplistic, read this: my children came home one day and mentioned to us in one of our endless gists, that someone in their class brought ‘shisha’ to school. I was curious and wondered what shisha was. They were surprised that their mum and I didn’t know shisha and were even laughing at us.
By the time they explained what it was, I sat upright and took the ‘gist’ with more seriousness. I quickly googled the name and was soon on the same page with them.
And then they asked me, ‘is it good to smoke shisha’? The question was like a bombshell to me, but I concealed my jolt and tried to make the discussion as trivial as possible. I only became comfortable after I was satisfied that they hadn’t tasted the substance. They told me their friends said that it has a sweet flavour, and that, unlike cigarette, it is harmless and that it enhances your status. I had to re-educate them about the dangers of smoking, in any form or disguise.
Parents, just as you are continuously imbibing in your children good values that will set them on the path of destiny, the vicious world of delinquency is equally stopping at nothing to recruit them. They come in contact with different counsels and counsellors that test the stamina of the virtues you have instilled in them – their peers, spurious literature of every kind and the internet, among others. Due to their high impressionability, if those values have not taken root, they will soon be displaced. And even if they have and they come under continual attack, it’s only a matter of time, they may be uprooted.
It therefore behoves you to be the untiring sentry that wards off vicious incursions into the moral tower that you daily struggle to build for your children. You must be unrelenting in checking, reviewing and scrutinising their values in accordance with the standards you have set, from time to time, and it must be an on-going exercise. In other words, always check if they have not lost the values you have laboured to build into them. This is what I call detoxification and recalibration – weeding out the negatives and relentlessly instilling the positives – and it’s a must, if you won’t lose them to the contending world of depravity.
It therefore behoves you to be the untiring sentry that wards off vicious incursions into the moral tower that you daily struggle to build for your children.
‘ Femi Adekunle, a Parenting and Family Coach, writes from Abuja, Nigeria.
Email: femi383@gmail.com
WhatsApp: 08055103512
30th January, 2026
