#ThisisMyStory
#ThisisMyJourney
#ThisisMyLesson

I, The Preacher wish you a very happy Easter dear STANDARDS BEARERS. I believe we are doing our best to deliberately enjoy the long weekend.

I am here to finish the business we started for almost a week ago. It was my plan to end the conversation on this subject matter the day after but I have been thwarted by so many things. But to God be the glory that I am here to round up.

In our last post we made effort to establish the disconnection between today’s caregivers and the precious children and young people they are saddled with the responsibility of providing direction for in the 21st Century.

We opined that today’s caregivers fail to accept the reality that times have changed.

Permit me to start today by saying that African caregivers seem to glory in their status rather than their capacity. So we celebrate our status and make no deliberate efforts to build capacity.  We are unaware that deliberate investment in building  the relevant capacity  helps us to face, surmount and triumph over the challenges of 21stcentury and prepare us to help our precious children and young people not only take responsibility for the PERSONAL SAFETY and SELF-PROTECTION but to also optimize and take full advantage of the limitless opportunities of 21st Century.

This is what we call entitlement mentality in this regard; this uninformed and archaic idea of the African caregivers putting all of our confidence our STATUS and not in our CAPACITY. We forget that our STATUS as caregivers assigns to us definite roles and responsibilities and our failure to live up to these roles and responsibilities renders our STATUS useless.

Before the 21st century and its limitless opportunities and daring complexities, it was not enough to be primary and secondary caregivers just by STATUS. If it was not enough then, I beg to submit that it is nothing now.

Bill Gates Senior in his book Showing Up for Life submitted, ‘I am intrigued by the fact that most of us seldom look for any guidance on how to perform competently as parents when there is so much good formal training and information available.’ He continued as follows: ‘Mary and I took one Parent Effectiveness Training course together at our church. It wasn’t nearly enough. Even so, I still remember a lesson from that class worth passing on. “No matter what you do, never ever demean your child.’

Today it is now common for caregiver to be shocked at the negative things our precious young people are capable of planning and executing. We get very angry when we discover that our precious children have taken advantage of our avoidable ignorance. The video went viral the other day of a father who claimed to have been deceived by his undergraduate son and went to cane him publicly at the university. It is instructive that the father found the courage to believe that he had not role to play in who the child has become. It is more instructive that the father may not consider his action an exercise in public show of shame and it he did, he found the peace to exonerate himself from same, thinking that the public show of shame only belonged to his dear son.

It is my conclusion that the son was a reflection of the ignorance of his father and it anybody should be canned it was the father. As far as I am concerned that son suffered double jeopardy. First a victim of the childhood training he received and secondly he became a victim of the unguarded anger of one of the people who failed to provide a guide.

The real challenge of today’s caregiver is that you are trying to employ obsolete knowledge and skills, learnt by our experience of child to prepare our precious children of today for the limitless opportunities of today and the future and the challenges thereof.

What should today’s caregiver do? First we must drop our entitlement mentality, humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God, apologize to our precious young one and enlist them as parts in progress in the matter of guiding them through the limitless opportunities of the 21st Century and the seemingly insurmountable challenges thereof.

The first tenet of our partnership with our precious young ones is to be ready to LEARN OF them and LEARN FROM them. While I will be here tomorrow to share with us what it means to share to LEARN OF and LEARN FROM our precious young people, permit me to round off today by saying that we must be ready to LEARN WHAT and HOW the 21st century children and young people want to be guided.
Research has shown that one of the ways the 21st century wants to be guided is through PLAY; through entertainment. Our young people today have everything but attention and if we must arrest their attention, it must be with something which interests them and not necessarily what interest us.

That is the role of our monthly comic, S.A.F.E™Ville. It is a deliberate breakaway from the norm and it is for caregivers who see the future from now and know that the future begins NOW if only we create it now. It is for caregivers who know that your right to play and reap the benefits of the future is only preserved in deliberately enlisting our precious children and young people as part of those, who through superior intelligence create the future, knowing that the empires of the future are minds and are in the mind.

I urge you to place your order of the comic today for the precious children within your network and areas of influence today.

Do have an INSPIRED weekend.

Yours IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE PRECIOUS AFRICAN CHILD,
Taiwo AKINLAMI