Its time Kenya turns attention to the boy child

By JOHN KARIUKI

In one secondary school, a teacher noted a sharp decline in one boy’s performance in class. After inquiring, she realised the boy had fallen out with his parents over how they treated him and his elder sister.

Her back-to-school shopping topped Sh3,000 and she had the honour of going to the supermarket on her own. But it was a different matter with the boy. Apparently, his parents shopped for him and in an ad hoc manner, bringing the items home as they remembered them; his entire shopping rarely exceeded Sh1,000.

When his shoes got torn, his parents would call the school advising him to bear it, like a man, until midterm break or closing day. The implicit message was that men should be frugal and can do with one or two bath soaps while girls should live like queens.

Elsewhere, an upper primary school boy developed stomach ulcers that had, seemingly, no organic cause. After several visits to the doctor, the real reason for his ailment unfurled.

His parents often sent him off upcountry every holiday, ostensibly to “toughen up like a man” by helping his uncles to mind the animals and till the land. Meanwhile, his elder sisters would spend their holidays in posh estates in Mombasa with their urban kin and come home with stories to boot. It required the doctor’s personal intervention to convince the shocked parents that this was not the way to make a man out of their son — he was simply a child who needed as much pampering as their daughters!

The above anecdotes illustrate a growing social phenomenon where the boy child is neglected at the expense of the girl child. Over the last decade or so, a lot has been said and done in the liberation of the girl child. But even then, we seem to be going overboard. I teach in a mixed secondary school and over the last decade I have noted that the girl-boy rift is perceptibly widening, at least in school. We must urgently address the plight of the boy child and let him flourish if we aspire to have future generations of socially balanced men.