BY OGESTAR AKPOS
Children are products of their environment. Parents, teachers, neighbours and the church form a large part of their environment. What they see and hear will, to a great extent, form their behavioral make-up and on the long run their personality.
It is a truism that the economy is unbalanced, hence, in a bid to meet up you may not be able to give ample time to create the enabling environment for your children to develop proper character, behavior and generally acceptable personality make-up.
Children will always be children. So, they should not be left alone. They need to be properly guided. Good personal hygiene, good reading habits, will go a long way to mould them and shape their character.
Good personal hygiene is key to healthy living. You are aware that the average child may declare early morning cleaning routine such as brushing the teeth and taking his/her bath as stressful and disturbance. If you are facing this challenge, you are not alone. Solutions may not be generally applicable because of individual differences.
However, a little health talk might help no matter how old the child is. You may show them videos of children with decayed teeth wriggling in pain; children whose unclean habits have exposed hem to skin diseases; this will send the message home. You will agree that people learn faster what they see than what they hear. Instead of screaming and beating and turn your house to war fronts, please save yourself and your children the stress and engage them on a visual mother or father to children talk session.
Good reading habits. I believe you will agree with me that reading is hard work. It is worse for our children who view reading as boring and stressful. They are only motivated to read when exams start knocking on their doors. So what do they do? They end up memorizing and downloading into the exams paper and then the knowledge will fly off just as they came. If we were guilty of this, here is a chance for a change of attitude in our children.
This is not an easy task, therefore you have to start they are young by introducing them to pictorial story books. Do you have story books in your house? And do you read them with your kids? How about bed time stories? You might think is western and alien to us. But, do you remember tales at moon light? Due to changes in lifestyle occasioned by civilization, you may not be able to read your children stories under the moon light. Maybe, you can adopt the bed time stories. The chances that your children will develop interest in reading are high when they see you read to them.
