Why a man has no business soft-parenting

They have unwrapped a new bale of kids. These ones come with pre-installed disrespect, and with entitlement leaking from their pores.

It is the kind of entitlement they tap into when they hold your phone hostage, rejecting incoming calls with the speed and impunity of a cheating boyfriend.

That same entitlement they channel when they are being carried through the snacks aisle at a supermarket, a frantic period during which the threat of deafening screams will humble you as a parent.

But it is the disrespect that is staggering. These kids will call their parents by their first name.

They may only be a few years old, and their tongues may not have evolved beyond their primary nipple-locating duties, but they will still have it easier enunciating ‘Scolastica’ than ‘Mummy’.

The kids have no fear. They will ask you, while you’re in the company of esteemed colleagues, why your head is so big.

They will sprint into the living room while you’re on a video call with your Singapore bosses and slap you, then scamper off. And they will report you to your lady when you smile at the M-Pesa lady for too long.

They will interrupt you while you’re yelling at them to tell you not to raise your voice at them, a feat that would have earned a millennial child the kind of beating reserved for village chicken thieves.

What happened, I wonder, to the kids who were so terrified of their folks they would not dare put a foot wrong?

I am forced to consider that the root of the problem might just be this new-fangled parenting hack known as soft parenting.

Gifted to us by the coloniser, the soft parenting model begs us to consider the essential fact that children, despite being known idiots, are also human beings.

It invites us to imagine a world where gentle, conversational words do the same job as the threat of imminent violence. 

I have heard all the think-pieces about teaching your young ones through love, not fear. As if you can ‘aki woiye’ a toddler out of a destructive, petulant rampage. As if they possess the ability to understand the dangers of kuchoma picha.

I understand the argument that one should not subject their kids to the same torture they witnessed growing up.

Indeed, this whole idea of a father as a fixed point of terror in the home has evolved so much that ‘Ngoja baba yako akuje’ simply bears no weight anymore.

Once upon a time, you knew, when you messed up, that your old man was going to kill you, or at least try to.

And then came the era of timeouts and sending kids to their room. The age of pulling young JayJay aside and explaining to him in a calm, measured tone that the television he just shattered cost Daddy three salaries.

“Si you know Daddy’s team is going to win the league this season? You don’t want him to see that?”

At best, today’s stern father has perfected his yelling voice, so that he can yell a single ‘WEWE!’ from anywhere in the house, and it will immediately put a stop to any tomfoolery the kids were engaging in.

Soft parenting flies in the face of our upbringing. If our ancestors were not already twisting and turning in their graves at the sight of their sons practising skincare, they are surely rattling with rage at the joke that those sons have made of fatherhood.

Even Wahenga might just come out of retirement if they hear that people have been wiping their asses with ‘Samaki mkunje angali mbichi’.

Today’s kids come with a manual, bearing a single phrase: “Must parent softly”. It is in your best interest to rip that thing out and reach for a belt instead.