The Importance of Teaching Your Children About Culture

Why do parents of today shun their culture? As Zimbabwean parents, many of us are guilty of not teaching our children to be proud to be able to speak their own language? We always push our children to speak English more than Shona/Ndebele. We do not expose our children to our culture when they are home or over the holidays. So many of my friends have said Zimbabweans overseas seem to lose their identity as if they are ashamed to be Zimbabwean. They forget they can speak Shona/NdebeleWe do not realise what we are doing to our children.

We are raising children that do not celebrate their uniqueness, their language, their traditions, old folk stories, tribal dressing, cultural food. Worldwide we see children fluent in their local languages, proud to participate in their traditions and celebrate special events in the year, yet we are here stopping our children from speaking the language and understanding their culture

A child with  no culture has no identity; they do not know where they come from and thus do not know who to be or what defines them. They end up trying to find themselves in other cultures

A child with no identity has low self esteem. They do not believe in themselves because they do not know who they are and thus they think they cannot achieve anything

You raise a child who feels inferior to other races, other nations, other cultures..Is that what you want?

We have to realise as parents that we are the cause of our child's loss of culture. Be proud of who you are and your child will be proud too..

Till next Monday

#beingaparent

Living Your Life Through Your Children

Monday was horribly cold in the studio and we had the aircon on!! Patience teased me that I had my whole wardrobe on, even though I still felt cold!! Winter is NOT for me!!

 But I warmed up as we started discussing how parents live their lives through their children.  Some of us grew up with regret that we did not get to fulfill our hopes and dreams, and thus we force our children to achieve them for us. It becomes a selfish motive, our own motive.  But what about your child's interests? When do those matter? The danger we face is not allowing our children to be who they are and let them discover what they want to be. They end up doing what you want or rebelling and achieving nothing sometimes or not having your support


If you have a confident child and you have a timid, shy child, the confident one may be strong enough to fight your demands, while the timid one will just go with YOUR flow and end up disliking the sport/course/career path, which isnt fair.  Imagine living your life doing a job you have no passion for, all because you were too scared to confront your parents? That doesnt seem fair at all.  Let your child be who they want to be. Like the poster said, you had your chance, but it is gone now.

I shared on the show that I know someone who did medicine because their parents wanted them to be a doctor; they graduated, handed the achievement to the parents, then went back to school to be an accountant...can you imagine the years wasted? The exams and practicals they had to do, all to please their parents. 

Patience raised a really great point on Monday, she said sometimes children need guidance and as a parent you should guide them. But how do you know when its too much?  For me, if my child is not enjoying what she is doing, I stop. The moment she says  no, its over. That however is different with academics I think. It all depends with what it is. Some courses your child will need to do for the future, maybe in that case, they do not have a choice.  Nowadays parents are more open to non-conventional career paths. I remember any career in music was a no no growing up, but now people are appreciating that it can make money (GOOD MONEY WHEN DONE WELL EVEN!!). What you would need to do is research the career path, the good institutions that give that course, and work with your child to achieve the best for them. 

With parenting, there isnt really a procedure manual on how to raise them; the important thing is to know what you are trying to achieve, how you get there is up to you.  All I want are happy, loving, healthy, environment conscious, self-confident children that will make this world a better place, and I pray with my method of parenting, I achieve it

Till next Monday...be happy

#beingaparent

The Importance of Knowing Your Child's Friends

It's always important to know who your child is playing with to understand the following:


1. Influence: Your child could be influenced to do things you do not approve of due to peer pressure

2. Backgrounds:  You need to make sure your child is playing with children who have similar backgrounds. Issues of values and beliefs can cause a change in your child if they are not strong enough to stand up for what they believe

3. Interests and common links: Your child's interests may change for the better or worse due their friends


4. Values: It gives you peace of mind to know that your child's friends have the same values


You child's character can change due to her environment. You must always know who they are with and monitor the changes along the way

Till next Monday...be happy

#beingaparent

Keeping Your Child Safe

Patience and I both agree that parenting is hard and gets harder as our children grow. We are not able to protect them as much as we can because they are out in the world that has a mix of people with different values and ways of doing things. We cannot be with our children 24/7 but what we can do is equip our children with ways of surviving out in the world.

The most important thing to do is listen to your children.  When you listen to what your children say and have the patience to understand what they are trying to say, you get to understand your children's fears, strengths and weaknesses. You know what your child can handle and thus equip them for what they cannot handle

Allow your children to ask you anything. I would rather my child learns about life from me than from the world. I want her to understand things in the way I feel she should understand, because I know what she can handle. Therefore, no topic is off limits

You must also teach your children. Your children must understand the importance of keeping in touch with you, telling the truth and following their gut, to make sure that they are safe.  They must know that you can only protect them/help them if they are open and honest with you. They must also know about trusting strangers. They must not trust any stranger and must always make sure to contact you if they feel unsafe. 

Make sure your children know their address, your cell number and the cell number of a guardian that they can contact if they do not get in touch with you. Let them know where to go if they are lost, to a church, a school or police station.

Children are being abducted regularly, but we must equip our kids so we can say we know what they will do if they are in trouble

Till next Monday...be happy

#beingaparent

How To Raise Confident Children

That sticker says it all. Allow your child to have an opinion or to think of how to do something.  Because my family believes in me and what I am capable of, my confidence is boosted, and that is the same with a child. If you tell your child that they are not normal or think out of the ordinary or they need to stop being a dreamer, they will believe it, and you could crush their dreams.

We also tend to want to protect our children from getting hurt or disappointed, so we do not let them try or explore, which could also crush their dreams.

Here are some ideas we found 

1.       Let them try

Guide your children on what to do and let them listen to your instructions but also do it without you doing it for them. This will show them that you trust them

2. Appreciate the effort

Getting it right is not important; the effort is more important and that is what keeps them going and willing to try again. Acknowledge their effort

3. Use encouraging words

If they they get it wrong, let them know it is ok, and encourage them to try again. Ask them what they learnt and how they will do it differently

4. Encourage them to dream

Allow your children to dream of going to the moon or becoming president. It allows them to believe that anything is achievable, and they are not afraid to try

5. Give them tasks they can achieve

Do not set them up for failure, it will not achieve anything positive

It's all about encouragement and allowing them to dream and accepting them for who they are. That makes the great people we have today leading us and running corporations

Till next Monday...be happy

#beingaparent

Is it good to leave an inheritance for your children?

Should you leave something for your children? Why/Why Not? I definitely say whatever you leave, it must be left in a way that makes your child work for it and not feel entitled to it. That cartoon is funny, but it is real. If my parents told me I have a company that I will inherit or a lumpsum waiting for me, I would definitely not be as driven as I am to succeed, why? Because my parents already did the work for me! All I would have to do is sit and wait to receive my inheritance.  Someone else might react differently to that inheritance, but the important message is that inheritance can have positive or negative effects on our children.

Patience of course thought it is important to leave an inheritance to help our children. Such different parenting styles we have! Hahahah, but it makes the show even more fun with our different views

So how should one do it to make sure our children appreciate what we leave them?
 Here are a few suggestions:

1. Link payouts to an achievement: You could link their inheritance to achieving a degree or starting a business for example

2. Monitor how your children handle small amounts: See how your children handle $1000 for example and then increase the amounts over the years.  This reduces the 'shock' of receiving a large sum of money

3. Contribute to the payment of an asset: You could pay the deposit for a car or a house for your child, by doing this, they have an asset that they own

4. Buy them an asset as a loan: Loan out part of the inheritance to your child to teach them how to handle servicing debt. This teaches them a lesson of meeting your obligations. Should they wish for an expensive house/car they will learn how to budget or understand the cost of expensive things

These are just a few ideas to secure your hard work.  We all work hard for our children, but let us not be blinded by that and not think how they will handle the inheritance. Help them manage it

Till next Monday...be happy

#beingaparent

Technology and Your Kids

So I declared on the show that my children will only receive cellphones when they are 16 and I will monitor their activity on their laptops very closely. Technology scares me!! I would like to delay the whole process as much as possible because I fear what will happen when they get cellphones. The number of pictures and videos sent in Whatsapp, dirty pictures linked to certain words on Google search all scare me to be honest. How do I protect my child from all that? I can only protect them when they are under my roof, but what they do outside of my home with their friends and families, exposes them to so much. Do I want them to learn this from me or from someone else? 

Patience shared that her son has a basic phone that he uses to call her and text her.  She said she feels safe because that phone has no access to Whatsapp or YouTube. But I highlighted that anyone can call him and speak to him still at the end of the day. No matter what we do, we cannot protect our children 100%

So what do we do?

We were both quite conflicted as to what is the right age to give a child a phone, so we looked up what experts say about children and technology.  This is from Joyce Marter, a Psychotherapist:

Verizon Wireless and Parenting.com conducted a survey in 2011 asking 519 parents with children ages 6 to 17 at what age did they or would they give their child a cellphone. 

• About 10% of respondents chose the ages of 7 - 9, 
• 32% opted for ages 10 -12 and 
• nearly 40% said they wouldn’t give their child a cellphone until he or she was age 13 -15.

What are the benefits to a child having a cellphone or device with Internet access?
• Being able to reach your child
• Knowing where your child is via a GPS tracking device
• Helping your child learn through educational applications
• Providing social inclusion in a technological age

What are the safety concerns?
• Vulnerability to predators on the Internet
• Access to inappropriate content on the Internet
• Susceptibility to cyberbullying
• The possibility your child could share inappropriate content via text, photo or video

How can you keep your child safe?
• Use the restrictions page and block some things like YouTube, Safari and iTunes. IOS devices (iPhone and iPad) have a restrictions configuration page in Settings -> General -> Restrictions. The following apps can be disabled: Safari, YouTube, Camera, FaceTime, iTunes, Ping, Installing Apps, and Deleting Apps. On this page you can also adjust the allowed content.
• Use a parental control app to block pornography. If you have an Android device, you can install a free app called Android Parental Control that does similar things to the iPhone restrictions page mentioned above.
• Restrict your child’s contacts (email, text and social media) to family and friends whose parents you know.

What are the social concerns?
• Alienation
• Cyberbullying
• Communication problems such as misunderstood messages

How can you combat these concerns?
Provide education and guidance about appropriate communication via technology, and set the following boundaries.
• When they can use it—for instance, not during school hours or after 8 p.m., not during social events such as family gatherings or play dates when they should be relating face to face rather than through technology.
• How much can they use it. I recommend less than two hours a day to reduce development of addictive/compulsive behaviors.
• Where they can use it—for instance, not at school or events related to school, religion or athletics.

 http://www.joyce-marter.com/blog/joyce-marter-blog/promoting-safety-wellness-in-kids-use-of-technology/

Educate them at a level that is developmentally appropriate about the pros and cons of technology. 

Be clear about the rules and the consequences for breaking them. Then trust your child to be responsible. 

Follow through with the consequences if the rules are broken. View your child’s mistakes as opportunities for learning and growth, and keep the dialogue going

Parents need to provide roots but also wings: Educate and set parameters, but allow your kids the freedom to learn and grow

This topic I leave to you parents, you know what works best for you

Till next Monday...be happy

#beingaparent