By Sorie Rahman Sesay

Sometimes parents and other relatives around a child forget that childhood is a stage where one is inclined to doing things that are wrong. These days you see contents on social media, women wherein children are being manhandled about mistakes they don’t have control over. A child is such that it does exactly what you don’t want them to do. To make matters worse they will give a wild smile after they err. Yes, this is because they think that everything is good. For those around the ages of four to 17, they try anything they come in contact with and they don’t mind to regret their decisions afterwards.

On the aspect of learning, it is the teacher or whoever it might be that should be crafty enough to try many teaching methods. When the teacher finally realizes a particular method that the child can relate with, he will easily achieve his goal. In getting children to learn, teachers should not try one method fits all theory because children have different ways of learning and at different paces. Obviously, there are fast learners, average learners, and slow learners; based on that, teachers should be able to manage the situation of every child in the class. There is a famous saying that, ” if you spear the rod, you will spoil the child.” To an extent of 99% this is not correct. The presence of the cain drives their wit away. The need to cajoled, pampered, and encouraged to learn. You cannot call a mouse to a room of cats. That is the situation between children and cain. However, there are teachers that go overboard to beat children even beyond the expectation of the school authorities; breaking the child right rules because the child cannot pronounce A as adults do. I have seen where children are mercilessly beaten because of one or two mistakes they did in the process of learning. Once in a while teachers should try the reward-based learning method in the class room or private lesson classes. This is a method whereby children are rewarded with goodies when they answer a question in class.

Let children be children. The exposure of certain ideas, media contents, movies, words, etc takes away their innocence. That ruins their lives as children and when they grow up as adults. Families should try by all possible means to keep the aforementioned away from them (children). Depression might start at childhood. The Kush addicts we see on the streets today some of them are victims of bad parenting. Sometimes when they say vulgar words that will leave everyone shocked in the room. The sad part is that parents and relatives laugh about it and sometimes consider it brilliance. That act should be gently stopped from the onset.  It is said that “you train up a child the way they should grow” — how is it that you want your son to be a lawyer but from the onset he is behaving like a hoodlum. Children should be children. As children, they learn from what the environment they find themselves. Whatever the child says, it must have heard it from someone. If a child flies from the couch to the floor afterwards, he poses like spiderman, he must have watched that action in a movie. It is impossible for the child to behave like that naturally without being exposed to such behaviour. Parents, teachers, and relatives should always be in their best behaviour if we really want a better future. I know it sounds funny, but it is fact that children are the future of tomorrow.

The management of their time is in the hands of the parents. Children, as I said earlier, are inclined to what makes them happy. So inasmuch as watching cartoons is fun, they will rather watch cartoons than to study. It is the responsibility of the parents to remind them of their study time likewise bedtime. Parents should not leave the children to manage their time because they don’t think like adults do. While trying to get them on the straight path, brutality should not be applied when gentility fails.

Yes, they can be stubborn sometimes, even after you have tried many ways to make them comply. One or two reasons might lead to that. It is either they are not in the mood or they are tired. It is okay for a child to not be in the mood to do something especially when it is interesting like watching a cartoon movie. Let them be excused for that particular moment and whatever it is, it should be done later. It is said that “you can force a horse to river, but you cannot force it to drink” — the same goes for children. If you force them to learn at the moment when they don’t want to learn, that will cause them to totally hate the classroom and they will end up becoming drop-outs in school. If it is left with them, they don’t even want to do anything that is wrecking their brain. They just want to flex and explore things around them. So, it takes gentleness to get the to do what you want them to do.

It will be an ideal for young parents and also those with fixated African traditional practices of raising kids to be taught the modern way of raising kids. African is the only place where a child is beaten to stop crying. There is myth in some religions like Islam that the Quran came down with a cain; therefore, children must be beaten to learn the Quran. However, when you look into the Islamic texts, there is nothing like that. So religious scholars also have a part to play in debunking the ideology that paves a way for teachers and parents to beat their children.