A generation living in mortal fear of teenagers

Many years ago, when yours truly was a school boy, closing day was nothing to look forward to. Far from the fact that there would be someone challenging you to an end-of-term fistfight, our version of holiday entailed weeks of hard labour.

Contrast that with modern life, where children look forward to a holiday of cycling through the lush village paths, swimming in heated pools and other well-financed exploits.

Barely a day into the holiday, the old man would bang the door to the boys’ crib so hard I feared he would break it.

And, thus jolted into wakefulness, he would be all over shouting that men-in-the-making should not be asleep after cock-crow. So we would yawn our way to the coffee bushes dodging the dreaded chameleons to meet the day’s berry-picking targets, or hoeing away next to Kathari stream.

Once in a while you cooked up a clever story and your parents allowed you to go ‘visit’ your grandfather or some relative in a far-off place where your cousins had time to roll downhill on a wooden go-kart or to go swimming some roaring river. In those days, no one sulked for pocket money, or demanded that the bike be repaired, and other pastimes for which we cough cash without much of a fuss. Asking for money would have been almost sacrilegious. And as we used to joke, our parents were so quick to using the whip that they would sometimes punish you for the mistakes you were to commit the following day.

So, much as we hone some good work ethic, I do not know whether that was better parenting than what obtains today. In all honesty, the punishment was oft-times not commensurate with the crimes committed. Back then, we actually suspected parents would ease their ‘stress’ by caning the kids and, in many families, their spouses.

Worse still, psychologists aver that children brought up in such reign of terror tend to be melancholy, withdrawn and abnormally introverted. But while the modern child is brought up in an environment of freedom, which prepares them to be more confident citizens later in life, a few missing links have to be pointed out. We live in times where, in a national conspiracy of sorts, we have agreed not to discuss or admit how much we fear our children.

I suspect the reason we still secretly pay tuition fees even after the government outlawed it is that it obviates the need to have to spend more time with them. Sometime last year, I found a colleague smoking at some spot outside the office, his face furrowed in mock horror. When I asked him whether he was okay, he confessed he was horrified that his children had insisted they would not be spending the impending holiday with their granny in the village as they wanted to be with their parents in Nairobi. Is it the upkeep money?

No, he said, looking so dreadfully harassed I had to drop my line of questioning. Ah, while our parents looked forward to the holidays to work our guts out and to whip some sense into our badly behaved selves, the modern parent wishes the children could be with the ‘headache’ forever. Over a drink two weeks ago, a primary school teacher said to me: “Teaching in a private school is hell on earth nowadays. You can’t discipline the pupils, yet if they are badly behaved, you are not doing enough!”

In such schools, he said, there are no pupils and parents, but ‘clients’, from whom school owners milk millions through holiday trips. Anything to keep the kids in school. In my time, if you were sent home for your parent over indiscipline, he or she would whip you numb after the teacher was done with you.

Today, the child is always right. And while we should not terrorise them like back in the day, maybe we should find a way of spending time with and correcting them. Otherwise, even stories of what they currently do in buses from school is just a curtain raiser to an uglier thing that is perhaps still doing press-ups in hell.

The writer is a Revise Editor for The Standard