By Charles T.M.J. Dube

IN our last instalment, we talked about parenting and made some bold assertions: “A parent who capacitates his child to provide for himself and his family when his time becomes due while failing to provide for them, might even turn out to be a better parent, when all is said and done.
True transformation is a result of a heart that is not corrupt.
A heart that is not corrupt knows no turmoil and is at peace with its environment reserving all its energy for productivity and creativity.”
I contended the parent’s major role was to develop the inside man, the heart.
This makes the parent very critical in shaping and bringing up a productive and effective citizen who will be of worth to humanity, his country, community and family.
There were six family-based shaping influences that I touched on, viz. its structure, role plays, the values it exhibited and promoted, how it resolved conflict, its general responses to failure and the family history.
It is important for every responsible parent to interrogate these in relation to child parenting to bring up a child who would not baulk the challenges of life and grow into a responsible, productive and worthy citizen.
The introduction of the divine into a child’s shaping influences also acted as a spring to navigate near impossible social outcomes, both as child and adult.
I further advised a child is greatly influenced by what he observes in his environment.
This begets the question: What lessons are we imparting to our children in the current Zimbabwe?
Are we teaching them the principle of ‘each man for himself and God for us all?
We reap in our children what we sow in them.
If we sow hard work, we reap hard work.
Sow greed and selfishness then we will reap corruption, thieves and a selfish comprador class in place of a nationalistic citizenry.
How we conduct ourselves as employees of our companies, institutions or entrepreneurs running our own businesses is invariably what we will see in our children and future generations.
The saying goes: “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
If you adopt that principle, then rest-assured whatever you build in your estate will not be inter-generational, but be buried with you or get dissipated by the second or third generation after you, if you are lucky.
This is the tragedy of Africa, where we mostly build our estate from corruption, filth and chicanery.
Mbudzi inofura payakasungirirwa (a goat grazes where it is tethered), itself an acronym for corruption, must not be observed as a standard value exhibited and promoted in our families, otherwise it will reflect in our national institutions and conduct of business, which is not sustainable and not capable of creating inter-generational wealth.
The Bible puts it well when Christ says: A good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bad fruit.
Our children are therefore to a large extent a reflection of what kind of parents we are.
When we headed cattle, we spent all day in the pastures, only to get back in the evening.
We learnt to survive from gathering from nature for our sustenance during all day. But there were those among us who opted to survive the easy way.
They would not bear the hardship of entering through the narrow door as it were, which was in itself, training for the future.
They could instead pick food from other people’s fields and gardens.
The parent who either sowed wisdom or vice in such child reaped what they sowed.
When such children grew up, these eventually transformed into the ‘Mbudzi inofurira payakasungirirwa’ genre.
Does the good book also not talk of building houses on rock or sand?
When we instil character in our children, we are laying their foundations on a rock and when the challenges of life come as they grow up, they will not betray their countries for selfish ends, but be one with their people in the fight to make right the challenges facing their nation.
Our country is in a state of despair because of a number of reasons.
True, there are economic sanctions against us.
But that is part of the violent wind the good book talks about in the parable of the ‘rocky and sandy foundations’.
We have allowed men of weak character to reign over our matters of state and companies, who when the violent wind in the form of the economic environment comes, think first of their own selves instead of the national character of their responsibilities.
When temptations come to take pickings from what they manage as stewards, they fail to withstand them.
Those all point to poor parenting which is not synonymous with poor up-bringing as we indicated in our last instalment; that good parenting gives emphasis in developing the inside man.
They do not have the patience to enter through the narrow gate, nor have they secured the art of being able to lead independent lives for livelihood, the very techniques we learnt herding cattle.
While talking parenting, it is also important that we move with the times and examine some of the challenges emanating from the emergence of social media. Father, mother and child run the danger of being fully engrossed in to social media to an extent that even during their family times when they are away from work, they will be ‘each to their gadgets and none to each other’s attention’.
This will see the family bonding and parenting time being hijacked by television, whatsapp, twitter and facebook.
Social media has the danger of being the thief that kills and destroys the necessary role-plays expected in the parent/child relationship that should provide for the nurturing and tutorship of the children into dependable adults.
Peer influence, which while necessary too for the child’s intellectual and social development, needs to be moderated by proper parenting.
The over-usage of social media militates against parental responsibility.
Social media and peers therefore become the extra shaping influences and challenges to modern-day parenting, especially if the former is not properly managed by the parents.