“I’m a mum to girls, I wish they were in a bubble and they could stay in that bubble until they turn 18 years.” I meet Lucy Mwakaba at a coffee house early in the morning. We’re seated at a corner. She is a children trainer with The Lead Child and her daughters are four and seven years old. She animatedly tells me about the 40 minutes sessions she had with children at a local primary school earlier in the week. “We were doing the vision board exercise then one of the little boys very confidently said that when they grow up they want to be a ‘Man’. He already envisions manhood which is valid dream.”
She tells me of how times have changed and with the internet, children have more options. In her class the career aspirations were out of the box; chefs, race car drivers, rock stars and footballers. I pick up from the internet of things, “What scares you when it comes to internet and children?”
“The internet has given our children a lot of information too fast. Think about the Blue Whale Challenge. It sounded like a very foreign thing for us Kenyans until a child died because of it.”
She mentions that her daughter has figured out her password and we chat about all those WhatsApp forwards that people send, some of which are in bad taste. From gory images of dead bodies during fires and accidents to uncensored sexual content. Lucy believes that with the overflow of information, parents need to get in front of the daunting sex conversation and fast.
“If you are beginning to talk to your children about sex when they are 14 years, you are late. The conversation will go something like… what do you know?” She gives me a story about an eight year old who unfortunately walked in on her parents having sex and was heard narrating what she saw in detail to the other kids in the neighbourhood. “This child can’t unsee what she saw… I advocate for you to start talking to children about sex when they are seven years.”
Lucy maps out a day in the life of a busy parent, how mummy and daddy work round the clock five days a week, how the kids start their days at 5am for school and on weekends do their sports, Sunday school and bouncing castles.
When it comes to time and children, she insists that it’s more about quantity rather than quality. That it’s getting into their little spaces, switching off the TV, coming down to their level, being childish, playing with them, making them feel important and becoming friends.
“Do parents then schedule time for ‘sex’ talks?”
“We have this fallacy that this talk is a one off talk, it’s not. It should be like every other moment in life and you should look for opportunities to engage, which come easily when you are friends. For instance when your child come home and goes like, ‘Today so and so removed their clothes, and it’s bad manners,’ you pick it up from there.”
Coming from the same school of thought, we dissect the fact that sex has been a taboo topic for eons earning the ambiguous tag of “Tabia mbaya” which is Swahili for “Bad manners”.
“Your train children on leadership skills and money. Why sex education for parents?”
“For our children training, we have a section called Sharpening The Saw and it looks at taking care of the physical, emotional, social, mental and spiritual aspects of a person. This one time a 12 year old asked me, ‘Teacher, is it okay to kiss?’, and when the conversation started, another a 8 year old then asked me to explain what a condom is.”
“How did you handle the condom question?”
“I had to even draw it to better explain…”
The program for adults is two-fold where they approach purity as a state of mind and not body alone. Secondly, they advise the parents on the right time to talk about what topics to the children. The training is also a forum for parents to interact, exchange notes and share experiences.
How do single parents deal?
“For a boy’s case, he needs to have that conversation with the father. If the parent is a single mother, they need to look for forums such as the church or identify sound family members who can teach the boy to be a man.”
Lucy adds that for single mothers with their girls, it’s worth them explaining with some candour what happened that they became single parents. Coming from this point of empathy is a good place to broach the subject.
“In another 20 years your girls will be 24 and 27 respectively. What do you want their take out in life to be?” I can sense that Lucy can’t imagine that time will come.
“I’d like that by the time they are that age they’d look back and say I gave them a legacy, for them to be voices of reason where their generations are concerned, plus the generations that is in them, and the generations after that.”
Our candid conversation ends and our coffees have since gotten cold. I can feel the gentleman seated next to us on his laptop stare as if wanting to ask some questions.
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