Deliberate Parenting

Like vultures around a carcass, my siblings and i hovered round and round the sitting room until we were certain our Boss was asleep.

My immediate younger brother snuck the remote from the side stool like a pro, turned down the volume and within minutes our favourite channel was on and we had all assumed our respective positions for easy escape.

Well, the Boss still beat us to it by letting us get comfy then sprang the surprise of opening his eyes before we could make good our escape. He made us all watch the 10pm news with him 😢😭and subsequently would ask us to sit  with him while watching the news with our pen  and paper and we'd read out to him what we gleaned at the end of the news hour.

Overtime we all became lovers of watching the news and that also marked the beginning of our reading culture.

Secondly, i remember how the first morning devotion upon our return for the holidays (my siblings and i all went to boarding school) was a time for family discussion and brainstorming.

After prayers Dad will always ask us what we hoped to achieve that holiday? What we were going to be contrubuting to the growth of the family that holiday? 

He made all of us state our goals  and contributions one by one. So before coming home, we put our minds to work to decide all these before meeting our Dad. Funny though, we began to learn to set goals, targets, make concrete plans and how we hoped to achieve them. This helped in shaping us not only to contribute to the welfare of the family, we learnt to plan, to be accountable, not to leave life to chance.

These are but a few ways my Dad deliberately built and helped us form our foundational characters to become thriving adults today.

You can never find my siblings and i just watching time go by. He always accessed us like 'what have you achieved this half of the year? Or what do you hope to achieve?...

Today, i'm replicating same in my kids.

You've got to be deliberate as a parent about the kind of kids you'd want to raise.

We cannot afford to leave our future(our kids) to chance.