My partner always says, “Who you be is what they’ll become.”
And honestly, that couldn’t be truer. As parents, we often forget that our children are our first and most attentive audience. They are constantly watching how we speak, how we react, how we treat others and yes, how we handle our emotions.
I’ve seen well behaved children whose calmness and respect reflect the kind of home they come from. You can tell they’ve been nurtured by emotionally grounded parents. On the other hand, I’ve also seen kids who struggle internally, who act out or seem constantly unsettled and quite often, you find that their parents are also fighting unseen emotional battles.
It’s easy to complain that our kids are “difficult,” but sometimes, their behavior is simply a reflection of what they’ve learned by watching us. They absorb our moods, our frustrations, and even our tone of voice.
Whether we like it or not, they mirror us.
There’s a verse in the Bible that says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6).
My mother loved this verse.
She would quote it often, then add her own saying: “As you make your bed, that’s how you’ll lay on it.”
I didn’t fully understand what she meant until I grew older.
Life, I’ve come to realize, is much deeper than we imagine, it’s a cycle.
In Nigerian pidgin, we say, “Life go touch everybody.” Meaning, what we put into the world, especially into the lives of our children, will one day come back to us.
So parents, this is a gentle reminder
Pay attention, not just to what your kids say, but to what they do.
Their behavior often reveals what they’re learning from you.
Be kind, be patient, and be mindful.
The little eyes watching you today are the adults who will shape tomorrow.
Goodluck.
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