Greetings!
In my family, I am among the eldest in the line of my siblings, which means I had a share in nurturing and training my younger siblings, and we did it in a completely African way. Although I wasn’t—and still am not—the type to beat children, I couldn’t avoid hitting my younger siblings countless times to correct them or get them to do what was right.
As I’ve mentioned in many of my blogs, I grew up in the village and was raised with the standard African culture of training a child. In those days, when city kids, whose parents didn’t shout at or beat them, visited us, they would behave so strangely. We didn’t need to look far to understand the reason for their weird behavior—it was because they didn’t receive full parental control. Imagine a 14-year-old girl defecating in a toilet and waiting for her mom to flush it for her. When we started forcing her to flush it herself, she rained all sorts of insults on us. Well, that’s the case of a spoilt brat, but such is often the outcome of children raised with the borrowed “English” way, which many people fail to see anything wrong with.
I have read a lot of articles and listened to many programs addressing the issue of physical punishment and other corrective measures for children. I’m an African man, and I still stand by the traditional method when it comes to raising my own kids....the physical punishment.
Do I derive joy in beating kids?
My answer is a big NO!
In fact, I step in to rescue children whenever I see their parents beating them excessively. For instance, my boss’s wife often loses her temper and begins to descend on the children in a harsh manner, which deeply unsettles me. I would intervene and rescue the children, and she would respond by saying, “Kingsley, you’re spoiling these children, and I don’t like it. Leave me to beat the hell out of them.”
I’d reply that what she had already done was enough to correct them and that excessive beating would only scare them.
So, that’s it. I support physical punishment but believe it should be administered in a controlled manner. It should be done with caution, accompanied by dialogue and advice in between. The fact is, no matter how much people talk about the disadvantages of physical punishment, it plays a significant role in correcting children. It instills fear in them, encouraging them to avoid repeating the behavior they were warned against.
Take the school system, for example. For those of us who attended schools where flogging was practiced, you’d agree with me that there were certain things we refrained from doing out of fear of being flogged. Over time, that cautious lifestyle became a part of us. Let me tell you, there are even some basic things I learned because of flogging—one of them being the four cardinal points. Yes, I still can’t forget how hard we were beaten before the four cardinal points sank into our brains. Lol😂
I’m not disputing the other methods of punishment that many people nowadays are adopting. It’s good, but it’s far too soft.
Thank you for reading.
