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DON’T JUST PREPARE, DEVELOP
‘Femi Adekunle on Parenting
When we talk about parenting, we always hear people say “prepare for parenting”. This is very correct. However, I have discovered that preparation is not enough, we must develop. To be up to date with your child, you must update.
The place of preparation has been emphasized, but development is superior to preparation. In other words, development is the superlative version of preparation. When all you do is prepare but fail to further develop yourself, you will be operating with stale capacity and be ill-equipped to face challenges. I’ll try to illustrate.
As a child, I got disgusted by many things my parents did. My dad loved music, but his choice of music was laughable. I wondered why someone would be thrilled by such sterile and anemic genre of music. When he took us to the tailor’s to make clothes, he prescribed such monotonous styles that we were irritated by his sense of fashion. When he took us to the barber’s, we wanted to do styles that were at variance with his prescription. We concluded he was such a boring human being who was out of touch with modernity.
Now, as a parent, I have been repaid in my own coin. There are so many contemporary musicians out there that my wife and I are amazed at the fact that the children know almost all of them by name and the lyrics of their songs. To them, they laugh at our ‘old school’ choice of music. When we buy clothes for them, we have to ensure they are carried along otherwise, they won’t touch them with a ten-foot pole if they don’t like them. When I take them to the barber’s, I am miffed at their choice of spurious hairstyle.
What’s the point here? Simple – life is dynamic. The knowledge of yesterday may be insufficient to handle the challenges of today. And when it comes to parenting, it won’t. When I was young, I loved to keep a diary of events. I always had a book where I recorded things, sometimes daily. However smart you were at keeping your diary away, our parents always had a way of finding them. Today, there is something called a password, with which your child can perpetually keep you away from their world if they really want to. Our parents had little difficulty in identifying and censoring our choice of friends. But today, you can physically be in the living room with your child, and they would have cruised away to a far end of the globe, unknown to you. You will be amazed at the kind and sophistication of some social media that your teenager navigates, of which you even have no inkling.
Believe this: every generation is a sophistication higher than the previous one. To enable you to parent a new generation, your obsolete knowledge, information, and proficiency will be insufficient. You must update, otherwise you will continually trail them and be unable to provide the leadership they inevitably and indisputably need.