By Joseph Akim Gordon
Problems, conflicts, and misunderstandings are part of life, whether you like it or not. They will happen, but you need not escalate them. As parents, you must learn to embrace the heart of forgiveness and reconciliation. You, as a father and mother, should not expose your weaknesses before your children by insulting each other or fighting each other while children are witnessing; they will take it as a normal situation because they learned from you, the parents.
Do not do wrong things in front of children, even if it is your love or sexual relationship; never do it in public when children are around you. Parents should play a role in cultivating a decent life and encourage children to work towards working together and sharing the little food that is available for the benefit of the whole family, giving them all equal status to children, male or female, to cultivate good understanding among themselves.
In a polygamous family, which is a man with several wives and children, the husband must cultivate or share his love with all his wives and children; justice must prevail over the sharing of family resources, which is often the source of family conflict. When the parents show true love to all the children, this sends a positive signal. It is to be noted that some parents segregate their children; the male children are supported more than the female children. For a polygamous marriage, you must cultivate true love for all your wives.
The problems with wives can affect the children of all the wives. For this reason, the husband must develop a good timetable for each wife. If you fail to implement this timetable, this is likely to bring problems to the house. On special occasions like Christmas and others, you must bring them together and provide them with the Christmas package equally, but of course, a wife with more children should get more to support all the children.
Children must be obedient to their parents, as it is stipulated in the holy bible that children must obey and respect their parents so that they can live long and be in peace like their parents, who brought them to this world and brought them up. Once you disrespect your parents, you are inviting curses on yourselves, because curses from your parents can damage your chances of living a happy life.
The parents have a special responsibility to educate their children and give them the opportunity to get involved in church education. This will shape their lives and encourage them to continue to be loyal and to grow with religious doctrine, which will streamline their behavior and distance them from wrongdoing. The best gifts that parents can offer their children are education and training. This is a lifelong gift that will enable them to stand on their own once they become adults. Lack of parental care, like food and other basic human amenities, is vital for your children.
Once this support in the house is lacking, this will mark the beginning of the end, in that children will move to the street to search for food and other life necessities. As such, they will join street children to collect food from the garbage in the street. They can also join criminal gangs and start to rob, loot, and kill for survival. Once this happens, it gives a bad name to the family and the community.
Once the children become outlawed and the blame is squarely placed on the parents, the parents can be considered parental failures, and there is a high probability that the children can be killed or disabled in the process of committing crimes. For these reasons, parents should give birth to the maximum number of children that they can manage to bring up and provide education for. When you give birth to many children and you have no capacity to support them or educate them, do not make such mistakes because you will cause pain to the community.
To keep unity in the family, you, the husband, as head of the family, need to show good leadership qualities. Do not show that you love one more than others; divide resources equally among your wives. Once you manage to keep your wives united, this will automatically reach the children. The same unity among the wives will prevail in your children from different mothers. Living in a family, you cannot rule out misunderstandings among your wives and children. You bring them together, counsel them, find the root causes of the problems, and handle the root causes properly; otherwise, it will divide your family.
You must be tactful to understand the problems, try to mediate and treat them equally. Whoever was the aggressor, advise them to forgive each other, followed by reconciliation. Surely, bringing children up and educating them is a challenging venture.
The continuity of the family depends on having children who will take over the family’s responsibilities when the parents depart this world. Family responsibility is a burden and a challenging responsibility. As men and women, be brave to tackle these responsibilities. It is a noble duty; nobody should be scared, as you must make sure of the continuity of your family.
The author can be reached through e-mail: akimgodon222@gmail.com