STREET-SMARTNESS IS A MUST TRAINING ‘Femi Adekunle on Parenting
STREET-SMARTNESS IS A MUST TRAINING
When my daughter was thirteen and in boarding school, we went to pick her from school one day as they vacated. As we drove out of the school premises on the way home, I kept thinking about the privileges our children have and which we never had, wondering if they are not the worse for it. In those moments as I drove quietly, I remembered my wife’s stories which she had shared with me.
While she was in secondary school, her family lived in Lagos while she schooled in Ibadan, another city, which was an hour and a half’s drive away. By the time she was our daughter’s age, in a boarding school in Ibadan, she travelled to and returned from school all by herself, in a public transport, not because her parents did not have a car, but it was part of the training. What was more, it became her responsibility to travel with and care for her immediate younger brother who had gained admission also in a boarding school in the same city where she schooled. In other words, at thirteen, she had responsibility for not just herself, but her younger brother who both had to embark on inter-state trips to and from school.
I decided to play a prank on my daughter. I stopped the car and pretended that it had an engine problem. We were not too far away from home at that point, so I told her she would have to find her way home. I watched her closely as her heart seemed to skip a bit. I cast a glance at my wife as hers seemed to beat even faster. “All by myself”? My daughter asked. So, I guided her on how to get home. I gave her more-than-enough fare and bid her bye. My plan was to discreetly drive behind the bus she took, but I lost them. As I drove home that day with the bus out of sight, a lot of questions raced through my mind. What if she was kidnapped? What if the bus detoured and faced another direction? What if it disappeared into thin air? Haven’t I made a mistake? The ‘what ifs’ were endless. Eventually, by the time we got home, she was there playing and waiting for us. It was an ice-breaker.
In this age of intense competition, parents cannot afford to raise kids who are not street-wise. They must be allowed to make their own mistakes and learn from it. Said someone, ”you can’t teach a child to be street smart, it is an art they must learn themselves. It starts with an unsupervised walk to school”.
We are pre-occupied with making them book-wise only, as parents, forgetting that in the centre-stage of life, the child that is book-wise only, will be dominated by the one that is street-wise, while the one that combines all will lead them both.
_….in the centre-stage of life, the child that is book-wise only, will be dominated by the one that is street-wise, while the one that combines all will lead them both._