• Friday, March 29, 2024
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A lie is a lie, white or not (Part 2)

lies

Those white lies you tell your child over time gradually erode trust and confidence in you because sooner or later the child will come to realise that she can’t take you at your word.
At home our children must ask permission before taking anything in the fridge or the store. My wife and I have always spoken in one voice so they know they can’t manipulate us or play us against each other. Once one of us says no they dare not go and ask the other, who they think may be more favourable.

These things have not only engendered trust between us but have made the children trustworthy and dependable too. And this is evident in their behaviour even when away from home. Needless to say, it also makes it very difficult for house helps to pilfer and then conveniently blame it on the children as we know what our children can do and cannot do. The helps, to their chagrin, discover this too, soon enough.

I remember a time when my wife and I wrongfully accused our son of something. We knew it would be totally out of character for him to do such a thing but everything just seemed to point in his direction. He was meant to take part in an inter-school arts competition but very suddenly he began to complain of having a stomach upset. There was no sign of this at all when I woke him up just a couple of hours before.

We concluded he was feigning ill health, especially when we got information that his, or rather our club, Manchester United were playing that afternoon and this meant he would miss the match. As it turned out, he had suffered a similar bout at school the day before but we weren’t aware of this. I scolded him so badly but he kept insisting that he wasn’t faking it.

Later that day, we discovered a note in his room that he had written to himself expressing deep pain because we refused to believe him. We felt so bad and guilty for putting him through that and for making him feel his word couldn’t be relied upon. We called him, revealed that we had seen the note, hugged him and apologised profusely. Good manners are not just about saying “please” and “thank you” but also saying “sorry” when you’re wrong. Many of us aren’t too good at that.

Too often, while totally disregarding the cacophony of car horns blaring, we cause terrible traffic just because we stop to patronize street hawkers and rather than apologise to those who we’ve so selfishly inconvenienced while contravening the state’s traffic law, which in itself is bad enough as it betrays a total lack of discpline, we hurl abuse at those trying to correct us.
I’ve never quite understood why we do that. No matter how one looks at this, it’s just wrong. Why, when it’s so clear we really don’t have the moral legs to stand on, do we stubbornly insist we’re in the right? Ironically, when we begin to notice selfish tendencies in our children we wonder where they got it from!

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The ability to say sorry when wrong often requires a generous measure of humility. However, we Nigerians are inherently proud people dwelling in a society that also conditions us to be so. Someone once said, “Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners.” If we genuinely desire to positively transform our society, we need to properly equip the younger generation with the right ideals and it’s the responsibility of each and every one of us to play his or her part regarding this.

I close our discussion with this rather apt quote by Edward Everett Hale which says: “I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do”

Changing the nation…one mind at a time

 

Oladapo Akande