5 DANGEROUS EFFECTS OF “HONOR YOUR MOTHER AND FATHER” TO CHILDREN

By Stephen W. Boniface.

       A life coach/speaker

This is an Instruction in one among the Ten Commandments in the Scripture (Ex. 20:1-21, Deut. 5:1-23). Yes every one of you will agree with me that it has a blessing attached to it. I am 100% theist. But from my experience and from what I hear from some people I coach or counsel, I will stand to tell you that this particular verse have brought a lot setbacks and regrets to some of our youths today. It has become a belief that limits our progress and success at times.

Good intention: Is that we treat our parents with respect and be grateful for them and listen to their good advice and instructions.

Often times this instruction carry the following dilemmas that could hinder us from achieving our goals in life either fast or slowly.     

Conditioned fear: extremely and overly concerned about disappointing your parents or that you will be disowned if you follow your heart. Some many of us children at times have good ideas and that comes into our mind for our good, but we lose that because of the conditioned fear we have on our parents.

-       Potential limits: holding yourself back from what you want and know you need to do or who you are because your parents (or others) do not approve. I have a good friend who always has great opportunities to excel and succeed for her future but there is this expression she usually use in Tagalog language ‘Ayaw nga ni mama’ which means in English ‘my mom don’t want, like’. This expression has been her hindrance until she connected me for coaching. Sometimes we would want to make a move, but mother might be our setbacks without them being aware of that, and we conditioning our minds on this commandment, we hurt our goals.

-       Afraid to take risk: often times due to the respect and fear of our parents, we become so afraid of tarnishing the good names of our parent, and let opportunities that requires risk taking to jump us or in other words pass us bye.

-     Fear of failure: my greatest fear isn’t to failure, but to be unable to rise when I fail. This particular commandment has a reward of long life attached to it. The reward makes us to be afraid of short life. We are always afraid to debunk the ideas of our parents even though it could be detrimental to our goal achieving steps.

-    Wrong choice making: as a senior seminarian then, my mom always tell me in my Igbo dialet, ‘nwa m jisie ike, ije a na achi achi, mana ya buru uche chineke, I ga emery; ya abughi, gi esi uzo ozo’ meaning in English, ‘my son persevere, this journey is slippery, but if it is the will of God, you shall win, but if not you follow another route to achieve your goal.’ Have you seen such parental exposure toward alternatives? But some parents makes a wrong choice for their sons, making them to see every reason to be; whether is suits them or not. Child will realize that he has made a wrong choice at last when there will be no possible means of revise.

This wrong choice making could be evident is so many ways in our lives, in marriage, career, relationships, etc.

Let us consider that parents might ignorant of the fact that there ideas and the fear of their children towards them are detrimental to their future, they might not be aware due to the parental inclination on children.

My advice to you as a child of a parent, pay critical attention to your parents’ ideas, scrutinize them very well. Choose the helpful ones and honorably debunk in a respectful manner those ones that are detrimental your success.