After having his firstborn child and daughter in 2006, Collin was scared of how he was going to raise another human being besides his wife and himself. He decided to take careful and deliberate steps to raise Keza and her three siblings.
Collin realized that raising his children through intentional parenting was the only way to give back to society. He, therefore, embarked on the journey and is already happy with what he is grooming.
“Unlike in the past when parenting was communal, it is no longer tenable because of the increased modernity and nuclear families which demand parents to be intentional about their parenting,” he said.
“If you choose to have kids, you should be intentional about parenting, you don't just have the gadgets to have children. Be intentional about parenting and be ready to have children because once they come along, it's a wrap,” he said.
He added that parents or those intending to be should have a vision regarding how they want to groom their children and how they will be as adults when they clock 18.
“The ‘how’ is a day-to-day process. I never knew what I was supposed to do when Keza was born. But because I was intentional about it, I kept on finding out every day about what works and what doesn’t. You need to have that big picture of how you want your children to be,” he advised.
In addition, he says this process involves day-to-day presence in the children’s lives and not merely the provision of their basic necessities.
He revealed that before his child began schooling at two years, they were already searching for good primary schools to take her and whether she would study under the national or international curriculum.
“By Grade V, I was looking for where to take her for secondary education. She went to a school in Mombasa called Agha Khan Academy. Everything is always right ahead of time. Of course, it's expensive but also cheaper since it was well planned,” Collin narrated.
For school selection, he engaged with the mentors to help choose schools the children could attend. According to him, if parents are not intentional in their parenting, they might have adults that can’t live independently.
To him, the Covid 19 Pandemic was also a rude awakening to many people including them when they learned that their children barely knew how to do home chores and had to teach them so they ca learn how to take care of themselves.
Additionally, he believes that it is useless for parents to send their male children for higher learning in an era where everything is going digital, including many jobs that will be digitalized and done by machines.
“Hands-on skills will be very vital because to have a sane population, people still need to have jobs which are hands-on. The robots we make, they won't make our food or furniture, there are several products that man has to give touch for them to come out right. And as men, we are gifted with hands. So I don’t see how I can have a boy child turn into an accountant tomorrow,” said Collin.
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