Keeping a family intact is a difficult task for parents. For the brilliant and successful child, the blame game is placed at the door steps of either the mother or the father.

Mothers from the cradle are seen as over -pampering the children as they start growing up. The male child is the darling of most mothers and they celebrate in style when they are born.

The wife, who bears more male children are regarded as jewels of inestimable val­ue, according to Chief Obafemi Awo when he used the flowering term to described his adorable wife, Hannah, then.

The stubborn male child is usually given a special place in the scheme of things when mothers are concerned. Psychologists however, reasoned that the girls are the favourites of their fathers. For most fathers, they give the kind of love to them as the weaker and most useful assets to them.

When mothers are sick, the daughters come to relieve their mothers and do the domestic chores she normally renders in the homes. They cook and wash dishes and even clothes of their parents which the boy child thinks is in the domain of women.

When a deviant boy child causes cease­less problems for the mothers, the com­plaint from the mother is that she was fed up with the erring child and she would prefer to go back to her village and stay away from the troublesome child.

Such deviant male child is usually hooked on religion and attends church ser­vices regularly every Sunday. The idea is to portray himself as a child of God while tor­menting his earthly parents with terrible acts of either thievery or evil intentions.

The badly behaved child now belongs to the father and if there is no reprieve, it could lead to a breakup of a happily mar­riage between husband and wife.

The situation presents a sad commen­tary on families. When the peace of a wife is unsettled, the total warmth and peace of the family unit is disorganized.

When an adult child is behaving like a petty pilferer, there is no way we could deal with it. It will be seen as bad family management for parents to handover their erring sons and daughters to the police for some harsh punishment.

The parents would be labeled wicked ones and other neighbours would believe we are aiding and abetting the child in his or her misdemeanors.

Children are believed to be gifts from God and when they turn out to be mal­adjusted by peer groups of smokers and drinkers, the parents do not move around with them and they return home like com­plete strangers.

There is a saying in the land, that there is bad bush where to consign bad children. Parents will just continue to pray along until the devil disturbing the child disap­pears miraculously.

This behaviour could be responsible to find a fitting wife for him and when a 50- year old man behaves like a child it bothers parents who regret ever giving birth to him.

If churches could reform people, the regular church going by this child ought to have been transformed for good.

When a character is formed over many years, it is difficult to retool such a person to the path of good breeding.

There is no amount of preaching from the pulpit that can change a hardened ad­dict of funny drugs like Indian hemp.

How many of such kids have you seen in your area and have the people around them coped with them? The wear a façade on their faces like humble and loving look and could make friends easily with many people who leave far away from their types.

The bad child I celebrated when he arrives with sudden affluence through dubious deals.

The bad child of yesterday becomes celebrated when fortune smiles on him. But we never forget the bad patch in his life and keep feeling alert all the time he is in the midst of his parents who will usu­ally shake their heads in surprise that the criminal of yesterday had become the mil­lionaire of today.

When criminals of yester years sud­denly find themselves in money, there is always a question mark over the source of his wealth. People would speak in hushed voices, did he break into a bank and looted the treasury dry?

There is no way we can measure the mental agonies of mothers who bear the brunt of domestic pilfering which virtually empties everything that she holds dear in her life.

When another loses hope in her son and the father is bemused at the way the son is acting like a drunken thief, he shakes his head in shame and could hardly confront him physically.

The issues are deeply spiritual as any physical confrontation could land both father and son in hospital with bathed breadth. Bad child is usually treated like an orphan as no one wants to identify with him as parents. Do you agree with this assess­ment? Call or write in your views.

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