As parents we should let go

Oct 11, 2009 Features / Columnists, My Column

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By Adam Harris

The other day I happened to think about the things parents would do for their children, never realizing that more often than not that when the children become adults there should be a letting go. The child is old enough to fend for himself and should be made to understand this.
It is not unusual in Guyana to find households in which grandmothers, mothers and their children live right up to the point where the grandchildren begin to produce children of their own.
This is called the extended family and it often negates the need for people to end up in senior citizens’ homes and day care centres. It also helps to ensure that family values are retained except that these days the younger children become so spoilt that they often can do no wrong in the eyes of the grandparents.
This is particularly so with grandparents who often intervene whenever the parents seek to discipline the child. More often than not this backfires.
Homes are often not large enough to accommodate the growing brood and in crowded situations many strange things happen. One of the fallouts is the growing number of deviants because the adults can hardly keep track of the number of children who needs guidance.
Scientists, experimenting with rats, found that adult rats kill the younger ones whenever the nest begins to become overcrowded. Courtesy of National Geographic, I discovered that it is the same with sea lions. One Sunday morning, I sat and watched the television to see sea lions, other than the parents, grab newborn cubs and hurl them to their death on the rocks below. The clan had become too large.
Birds push their young out of the nest when the parents think that they are old enough to fend for themselves. It is the same with a host of other animals. But human beings, with their ability to think, do not resort to such drastic measures.
The children are left to make the decision whether they will move out and start life on their own. I know that there are families who think about the extra dollar and would encourage their children to stay at home rather than venture out to pay a rent.
On Friday, I saw a case of an over-indulgent parent ending up dead at the hand of his son. The son is a drug addict who could not live with other relatives. He had been with his mother who at the time was living with her mother. He stole their things and turned on them in a vicious manner when they scolded him.
It was no big deal for him to strike his grandmother in the head, leaving her with a mark that would take her to the grave. He attacked his mother with a knife and could have killed her had people not intervened but not before he had broken her arm.
He was evicted from that home and he lived on the streets. There are no guaranteed meals or shelter on the streets and this man soon realised it. In the end, he turned to the only place where he was likely to be accepted—the home of his father. He had come out of jail for felonious wounding only a few months earlier.
Would I have accepted my son under similar conditions? I suppose I would because children are always children, no matter how old they become. Like this father, I would have tried to impose my rules.
But there comes a time when a parent knows that he/she is fighting a losing battle and he/she must make sharp decisions. On Friday, the father knew that it was time for him to make a decision and he died because of it. His son knifed him.
When we become old, we do not realize it and we challenge children in our senile moments. Rarely do parents kill children. Something holds us back. There is nothing to hold back a drug-crazed young man.
People are going to ask with hindsight whether the father was wise to have given his son shelter knowing that this man had violently attacked others who were close to him, none closer than the woman who gave him birth.
I recall these things because the father who died was my cousin. He grew up respecting his parents, not that he could have done anything better because the entire village of Beterverwagting would have come down on him.
On Friday, the village deserted him. A few people stood and watched him get knifed. His siblings and other close relatives were just not there.
I wonder what Guyana would have been like if there was no cocaine. It has destroyed the very fabric of the society and it is destroying families. But for all this, there are people who glorify the drug dealers in our midst. And sad to say, cocaine is here to stay.
I am left to wonder at the number of other parents who must die at the hands of drug-crazed children.
I still see the tears of a mother whose husband (not her son’s father) demanding that her son do not even approach the gate. The boy was a drug addict who had stolen so often from the home that he became feared.
The woman later said that while she knew that her husband was right, it hurt her to hear that order coming from someone else about her son. God saved her pain because her son died not too long after—on the streets.

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