Raising Chicken, Not Children

 

“It takes less than a minute to make a baby, but more than a decade to make a being.” ~ Abhijit Naskar

Schools in Kenya were ordered to close abruptly on Tuesday. Earlier than expected, all the kids were back at home. Kenyan meme lords were not caught sleeping and while it’s not a laughing matter, I’ve had a lot of laughs from the situation. So, let me redeem myself in my musings today – about ‘raising children.’

Jack Spirko of The Survival Podcast has severally spoken about bringing up kids but on a recent podcast, he caught my attention. He asserted that when we rear chicks, we never say we are ‘raising chicks’. We state we are ‘raising chicken’ even though they may just be day-old chicks. His question was, why then do we claim to be ‘raising children’ as opposed to ‘raising young men and women’ – which is the intended end product of our upbringing efforts?

Interesting question!

He then went on a rant about how we have a lot of ‘children’ in adult bodies still throwing adult tantrums, being irresponsible and entitled yet they are way over the age of majority. Not cool at all.

And the blame is not on the ‘children’ but on the caregivers who raised them.

Jordan Peterson in his book ’12 Rules for Life’, states in rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

Jordan posits that children are born into chaos – they know nothing and are dependent on their caregivers for everything. What distinguishes a good parent is their capability to guide their children to organize their existence in a way that will give it meaning. In summary, Jordan advises that parents should set clear rules and proper discipline for their children; because if they don’t, society will.

Back to Jack, he says when children are toddlers, they need a whole host of restrictions to keep them safe. Most of these are ‘because I said so’ kind of restrictions; since it’s probably too early for them to understand the why – for example why we look both ways before crossing the road or why we don’t play with fire. However, as the children grow, Jack says his goal is to get the children to build responsibility, self-discipline, and self-regulation. So every year, he would sit with each child and let them know which rules he was no longer going to enforce and what his expectation was for the child going forward. He would also let them know the consequences of failure, and in the event it happened, follow through with the stated consequences.

The gist of his message is he was raising young adults and he had a small window of time to get them to learn the rules of the society they live in, how to live with integrity and how to be responsible. Once they turned 18, there was no legal requirement for them to listen to him so he had to make good use of the time and opportunities that presented themselves until then.

So are you raising ‘children’ or responsible young people? Are you passing up opportunities to mold your children into responsible citizens of the world and expecting that those opportunities will re-present themselves to their teachers – who are paid to teach them anyway?

Do your children know how to handle the problems that come up in their day-to-day existence or are they trained to always run to you for every small matter? Are your children resilient or do they fall apart every time something doesn’t go their way? Do you allow your kids to converse with other people or keep them quiet when there’s company because you’re embarrassed about what they would say?

There’s a lot of dysfunction in society and some of it is driven by people who are too touchy, they get offended by everything. People whine about everything because life is ‘so unfair’. Sadly, suicide and crime statistics have also gone up, and it seems like we no longer have backbones as tough as our parents’ generation had. Yes, things have changed, but life is also much easier now than it was when we were young. People just seem to have less bandwidth to cope with everything they encounter.

If you are raising young people, please consider it a big responsibility and give it the seriousness it deserves. It is your responsibility to ensure that they become people who make you proud, not people that do things that make you dislike them.

“Teach children how they should live, and they will remember it all their life.” ~ Proverbs 22:6, Good News Translation