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Adults, especially parents, should teach their children the essential values of life such as keeping promises, sharing, working, saying you are sorry when you hurt someone and avoiding being unnecessarily grumpy in company

David Mungoshi Shelling The Nuts—

There are things we do without any hesitation whatsoever. Such things are part of our repertoire of social skills. Then there are things that we tend to forget to do but which often turn out to be phenomenally important. Such is life with its ups and downs.

If there is something I have learned not to do and learned it the hard way, it’s to never take anything or anyone for granted. This is the tragedy that bedevils today’s children, particularly those brought up away from home in places where the laws expect them to be treated as little kings and queens.

The English used to say, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

Those are bygone days when children were only heard, not seen. Touch them now and you lose them to foster care. The spoilt brats become oppressive.

Their vocabulary is wide and threatening. There is nothing they can’t say, from ugly to despicable and disgusting.

They are all in such a hurry to grow up. Too much television is seeing to that and video games tell them that they are macho.

Parents in the Diaspora work themselves to a standstill to provide everything for their offspring; smartphones, iPads, video games and lots of spending money. Their children can be counted on to give perfunctory thanks, but it doesn’t come easy to them.

We grew up learning how to do the things that would need doing in later life when we became adults and family people ourselves. Some of us dreamt of a house full of servants, in storybook fashion. But it generally escapes people that in order to be able to supervise maids and gardeners or occasional workers you need to know what needs doing and how it should be done.

Parents of these days love their children so much that they want to do almost everything for them including those things that the sweet little boys and girls should really be doing for themselves, like picking things off the floor, putting away their clothes where they should go, either into built-in cupboards or some other such place, neatly folded or hung up. Dirty things should, of course, be in the washing baskets. But what do we mostly find? Utter chaos and disorder!

Simple chores like laundering intimate personal garments, and pairs of socks or school stockings, should be done as a matter of course and on a daily basis as soon as they get back home from school.

Once children are habituated into necessary routines they get very good at sticking to them. But how many parents and guardians insist on any of these things? Most are only too ready to excuse their children from these little things which they soon forget to do because we too forget to make them do them.

A young Ghanaian woman once told me something fascinating about how she and her siblings were brought up. Her parents gave them points for doing certain chores; cleaning their rooms and making order including attending to their beds and always washing their hands after visits to the bathroom.

Looking smart and neat was especially endearing to her parents as was the ability to prepare family meals and wash the dishes without too much prompting. At the end of the week the points were tallied and displayed for all and sundry to see.

Coveted prizes such as “Most cooperative child of the week; Hardest working child of the week; Distinguished cook of the month” and so on were fiercely contested. At the end of the year the family came together to celebrate life and to reward those who deserved rewarding.

She spoke very nostalgically about these occasions when they each got something for whatever area they were deemed to have excelled in. The big thing for her was that these annual family awards helped groom her. Consequently, she swore (silently of course) never ever to be sloppy in any way. Her advice was that more parents should try some of these incentives.

Other things we often take for granted include family visits and wholesome entertainment around a crackling fire with mugs of sweet tea and slices of bread or biscuits to go with the tea. You can sit together on cold winter nights and listen to folktales from the grandparents.

The folktales are usually participatory and everyone can join into the singing and help bring the episodes alive. The same story told by different people on different occasions takes on a new identity and the children are always keen to hear them and to decide what the moral of each story is.

Even just entertaining each other with reminiscences, song and dance can be just so rewarding. Besides, you get to know what your children are listening to and what it is they are enthralled by. That way you can help deal with shortcomings and obsessions by chipping in here and there with helpful comments. Some of the lyrics to popular songs can be so adult you need to impose a PGA limit.

Some evenings can be popular request shows with one of you playing the DJ with the CDs. Activities of this nature help families gel and get to know what music they like as a family. In this day of social media and television it is easy to be a disjointed family with hardly any time for each other.

The art of conversation is very easily lost these days with each person hell-bent on being in their own small universe defined by social circles and WhatsApp messages and twitter. We need to show our children that we always have time for them, and for each other, and that social media can never displace or replace them, no matter what.

I know how excited my own family always were whenever I prepared and served them a meal. It didn’t matter too much that such meals by me were predictable. Why, I even got appreciative comments, especially for my scrambled eggs! On such occasions I could lecture my children without sounding too ancient or sanctimonious.

Children can be very particular about some of these things, and nasty too sometimes. My daughter told me the sad story of an elderly couple coming to visit the daughter of their old age at boarding school.

They drove to the school with the usual goodies that most schoolgirls value. What they didn’t know was that this girl had told her friends and classmates that her parents were, in fact, her grandparents.

And because she felt uneasy about elderly parents with no swag she did not want them staying too long on their visit, so she hurried them through everything, the mandatory sharing of a takeaway meal with them, a few polite enquiries about home and so on and so forth. Then the book inspections!

After the book inspections and conversations with the teachers the girl made her parents believe that it was expected of them to go away as quickly as possible after they had looked at her books and spoken to her teachers. I could hardly believe it when my daughter told me this unhappy story.

I have never stopped wondering if this nasty little person ever got to appreciate her parents and just how much they loved her and sacrificed for her. Did she ever get to say she was sorry for not being a nice person and for not being the daughter they wanted? I often wonder too if the unlucky couple lived long enough to see how she fared in later life.

Many adults, parents in particular, do not teach their children the essential values of life such as keeping promises, working, saying you are sorry when you hurt someone and avoiding being unnecessarily grumpy in company.

Amazingly, many children never thank their parents for anything. They expect their parents to do the things that they do for them as a matter of course. We are probably at fault here. Perhaps they never see us do any of these things, like saying thanks or giving compliments where they are due.

An uncle of mine was always in trouble with his wife because he ate her meals silently without ever complimenting her or acknowledging the trouble she had gone to in order to rustle up something for him.

One day I happened along at their place in time for lunch. The meal was delicious and sumptuous like a chef’s special at a top restaurant. I tore into my meal eagerly and gave profuse but sincere thanks to my aunt for feeding me so well.

You should have seen her smile then. She said she would be happy to do it again for me and wondered aloud why my sekuru never thanked her at all. My bemused uncle was dumbstruck. Take care to not forget these niceties.

David Mungoshi is an applied linguist, poet, short story writer and an award-winning novelist.