Invest time in your ward/Children Not Just money

Parents have two battles right in their hands; the economic position of the country which is near killing and the need to feed and live (dress, ride cars, build good houses etc.) well which have been more demanding than ever before.

The number two is that parents are also pressed with the demand of meeting the need of their wards/children financially. The financial demand and necessities coupled with the economic hardship is making it hard for parent to have time for their children. Parents dump children in school Monday to Fridays and dump them in Sunday school or Nasfat centres on Sunday. Parent pay good money to have their kids trained for them but alas, the kids are not properly trained.

One of my observation in my experimental reading and writing class is the poor level of concentration most of these children have which makes it almost impossible for them to be academically good. All of the kids cannot concentrate for a total of ten minutes at a go (I have mostly students above the class of primary four, so it is not a case of the children are too small). One escape route parent create in children upbringing apart from dumping these children with teachers in school, churches/mosques is the use of television programs to get the children off our neck. This is the tool used to engage the children on the only day most parents (salary earners) spend with their children. Television stimulates visual learning but does not stimulate critical thinking. Thus children perpetually glued to TV programs become lazy in using their brain to do things. One of the pupil continually scored zero in mathematics and quantitative reasoning and the problem was not that she never understood the logic or the calculation but the problem was that she always miss a zero or a number that needed to be multiplied, or subtracted etc. and she just hastily present the answer. Time for training need to be invested in kids to get the best out of them
The shocking revelation I got from the children is that most of them have short cuts of passing exams. The shortcuts are created by schools, teachers, head teachers in order to blur the inaptitude of the school from parent. When trying to help the pupil with poor concentration in mathematics and quantitative reasoning, I told her she needed to concentrate on those things because she would need the skill to pass her common entrance examination. The response of her elder brother startled me. ‘we were giving answers in my school during common entrance’. Then another one made a startling revelation that parents pay teachers in their school for pupil to be supplied answers during exams. These kids were not fabricating stories! It had taken me weeks of relating with them on all aspect of life for them to get comfortable in revealing to me things they would normally not reveal. Now the startling revelation set in, parents hardly know the kids they are raising. The time is not there, the economic pressure is too much, the demand to be in vogue is also very demanding and these kids are being raised by different people with different moral standard which has nosedived seriously due economic pressure. We neglect these children due economic pressure and due economic pressure they are taken advantage of. These children are thus exposed to different types of social vices; sexual harassment, peer pressure, rape, stealing, molestation and different form abuse (I have taken the children in my care through moral lessons like, peer pressure, sex education, abortion, sexual pressure and sexual abuse). That is why I am taking my time to plan and build my reading and writing centre which I want to make qualitative and give hope and succour to the children. But I am not planning to achieve this alone. The conventional schools might have replaced the role of parent but that I won’t do. I need the parents to get more involved with the children, I need them to take them off television as much as possible and I need the parent to be involved in their children education. That parents are not literate is not a barrier because one of my basic objectives is to educate parents to be able to educate their children