Raising a child or children is not easy and requires a lot from the parents to ensure the children turn out fine.
Parental values and Norms get passed down to the children when they grow up hence most people adopt the values of their parents with little or no modification.
Growing up, my parents were very much interested and invested into the growth of my siblings and I. They inculcated in us values that we would adopt in our day to day lives.
These values were generally accepted by the family and community at large as being proper and worthy of being done.
In addition to the generally accepted values, my parents taught us some special or extra values which includes speaking the local dialect and reading.
Having experienced my fair share of life, I am grateful for these teachings because I have seen how important they can be.
This is Africa and Nigeria specifically where people develop complexes and don't want to be associated with their roots because they feel it is inferior. They neglect a lot of things including their mother tongue. But not my parents.
I learnt how to speak my mother tongue as a child even before I learnt English language. This helped me to not only be grounded in my language but to have a good understanding of the English language because I learnt it with some maturity unlike those who began to speak it even before they could actually talk. These sets of people learnt English from the tongues of their care givers with all the grammatical errors accompanied.
In addition to not being very good with the English language, they cannot communicate in the mother tongue too. Imagine feeling lost when your own language is being spoken. This is a bad situation especially when you consider that the individual was raised in the environment. It would have been a different thing if he or she was brought up in a foreign land.
The second value which my parents made part of me is Reading. Reading is like oxygen, you don't know how important it is until you see a critically ill person who pays out of pocket just to get a breath.
A few weeks ago at a community gathering, a report was passed round for all to read and make comments about their thoughts. I spent no time in reading the report to ascertain that it was a charge for the members of the community to come together and say no to an abuse of power by a man who happened to be rich but was using his wealth to the detriment of the community at large.
I was surprised when a young man, a few years older than me turned to me to interpret the written words for him. I did, but it made me realise how lucky/blessed I was to not need someone to read stuffs out for me.
These two values I must pass down to my children because I know how important they are.
There are other lessons which I would teach my children like financial management, human relations among others but I know that if they can read and can communicate with others, they can as well learn it on their own.
This is my response to #februaryinleo day 13. You can join the initiative by clicking HERE
