By Megito Audu
Akinola Akinropo is a parenting expert. He has been a motivational coach for more than ten years. With the downward trend in educational, cultural and spiritual values, the lead researcher of ParenMark School of Parenting desires to see a new breed of parents who are consistently groomed, informed and raised to deliver on the great responsibilities placed on them as parents.
He explains to The Gazelle News.com why children must be allowed to experience pain and struggle.
Parenting coach, Akinola Akinropo started a 30-series episodes on parenting few weeks ago, to unearth many mistakes parents make in nurturing kids under a special product tagged #parentingwithakinropo on #LegacyHut.
According to him, he touched the consequences and also proffered solutions to them.
So, one of the many mistakes however, that is prominent among all is when parents want to remove pain and struggle from the way of the kids. This, he said, is a classical example of over functioning in parenting, which simply means doing too much for the children. Research, Akinropo revealed, has shown that one of the key indicators of the prevailing emotionally brittle adults is that parents rescue too soon their kids when they go through stuff.
“We know that as parents we need to be there for them in protection, in provision, and in pointing them in the right direction. Nonetheless, we need to strike the balance otherwise they lose the motivation to stay ahead when they see us do everything for them. But we must let them struggle so they can stay strong,” he pointed out.
Akinropo stated further, “when we remove struggle from them we actually lose the opportunity to help them develop resilience, creativity, and problem solving skills. I think it is better we learn from butterfly on jaw it is hard for him to break out of the cocoon but we only see the beauty of his colors outside We can’t continue in this brazen error in parenting because adults intervene like this, we only succeeded in solving short term problems”.
So what does he think is the way forward? Akinropo affirmed that the solution to this is to learn from the Mother Eagle. “You see, nature has furnished us with vivid picture of how we can learn quality and healthy leadership and parenting from various species of animals. I encourage parents to either adopt or adapt the model Mother Eagle employs to nurture her eaglets to be strong”.
“The mother Eagle, he analysed, “runs the eaglets through 5 critical stages, which are: the nurturing stage, the pain stage, the motivational stage, the protection stage and the last, confidence stage; where she releases them finally to the world to fend for themselves”.
This, he noted, is one of the many models that suit the Africa peculiarities
