Of Superstition and African Parenting…

For most of us, myself included, the chosen method of keeping us from getting hurt or in any other kind of danger was instilling fear. There were a lot of taboos that came attached with fear tags.

If you sit in the middle of the road you will get boils on your rear end… yes, they said that.

If you pass salt directly to someone else you will end up hating each other. That was a big one in my house. My father, MHSRIP, would never allow that, you had to set it down on the table.

Some would even say you will die on the same day if you hand each other salt. How life expectancy was linked to salt one can only wonder.

You couldn’t make noise at night because your voices would be stolen (don’t ask me how)

If you ate while sleeping, you would get numerous belly buttons, try explaining the science behind this one.

Now fast forward to present day, trying to raise my kids on my mother’s age-old advice(LAUGHS). What is it about these bundles or is it only mine? I tried telling my son if he kept lying down while he was eating, he would get numerous belly buttons and he rolled over the floor laughing. I actually felt embarrassed.

The mysterious man who catches noisy and naughty children, well they know he doesn’t exist because ‘unless he is God there is no way he can see all the children in the world,’ yeah yeah Mr smartypants.

So I have come to realize that in as much as the wisdom we gleaned from our parents is great when it comes to the fear factor, that will not work on these bundles of ours.

It is so much simpler to explain the why behind every no.

If you eat while lying down you will choke and die … now that’s a real thing.

If you sit in the middle of the road you will get hit by a car.

I wonder why though the older generation didn’t bother to break it down to us this way and chose instead to scare the life out of us, were we really that dull?

Keeping up with these tech-savvy kids of ours is a mammoth task, but thankfully all the other nuggets the older generation passed on seem to work just fine.