COMMUNITY GUIDED LICENSING OF PARENTHOOD
Dr. Tesfa G. Gebremedhin, 02 Dec 2004
West Virginia University 

The family is the center of personal affections and love that ennoble and enrich human life. It is the basic unit of our society and the primary social group that molds children with common attributes, humanity, spiritual beliefs and social activities. It is the most essential foundation for a deeply-embedded lasting human character and individual development of personality, human values and democratic mentality of children. It channels biological drives that might otherwise become socially destructive; it ensures the health care and education of children in a decent household; it cherishes cultural norms and social values and passes to children in a stable environment; it establishes continuity of ancestry from one generation to another; it nurtures and develops the individual initiative and unique creativity that distinguishes a person from other animals. The central role of the family is the protection of children against danger, illness, physical and mental abuse and anything else which might impair their natural development in life. Basically the family is the essential life-protecting shelter and life-promoting environment. The basic values inherent in being human develop in the family. There are human values which must be imparted, such as respect for the dignity of others, willingness to help, commitment to take responsibility, tolerance and endurance in time of crisis, and readiness to contribute to the common good through own efforts and initiative. It is important to form a strong and solid family because it is the basis of the entire mental, spiritual, social, moral and healthy physical development of children.

Children are the most beautiful, precious creatures and valuable human resources in the world today. They are causes for joy and a blessing from God. But some people consider the act of reproduction as casual event and they use it for mere recreation. Consequently, irresponsible people do conceive and bear children without considering what it takes to raise a child. It should be illegal to knowingly create a life that will be spent in pain and/or that will be severely substandard. It should be immoral to create a male child to carry on the name and continuity of the family line. It should be illegal to create life, to have children, in order to have another pair of hands at work in the field and/or business. It should be immoral to have children in order to have more of us in our clan than our neighbors or enemies. It is a crime to create a hell home for children that make them drop out of school and run away. It is absurd to get divorced from longtime spouse and jump to a new infatuation with other person and abandon children and make them live in destitute. It is really a crime not to spare time to be with your spouse and children when you have all the time to be at the bars, clubs and centers to play bingo, or to get drunk, or worse of all to argue on politics based on character assassination and personal attacks. Parents should be charged with reckless or negligent reproduction if they create a child by accident, or as they usually say, “it just happened” without considering the legal and parental responsibilities of raising children for adulthood. It is our responsibility to create a home as a refuge for children to be loved, cared and grow up as matured and responsible citizens.

In Eritrea, when families live together and are closer to one another, young parents often rely on the experience of their elders for parental skill. Some of us have fond memories of a grandmother’s lap or a grandfather’s shoulder for parental advice. Moral support from other family members teaches us how to raise children and comforts us through unique circumstances which nowadays can be various factors, such as divorce, illness or death of the parents, or other family crisis. But, most of us left some of those soothing moments behind to pursue a new life with more opportunities in host countries. We moved all the way across the globe where the culture is quite diverse and the lifestyle foreign to most of us. Our new generation, even in mixed cultural marriages, not only encounters the natural generation gap, but knows life only to be what it is in the countries they live in and they know very little about the cultural practices and social values of their parents and grandparents. On the other hand, we, the old or first generation in foreign lands, are passionate about our native culture and wish to pass as much of it as possible to our children. The strong traditional family ties and cultural heritage, as discouraging and annoying as we may be at times due to political squabbles and non-political misunderstandings, are what should keep us together as Eritreans.

The existing paradigm in any society is that children are the property of their biological parents. Anyone who conceives and gives birth to a child has the full care and custody of that child until the child is damaged by abuse or neglect. No one asks if that person is capable of parenting that child. Most children who live in low income housing, who come from broken homes, who receive welfare handouts from governments, who have been abused, or who have criminal parents, are destined for criminality when any of these factors converge with parental abuse and neglect. It is commonly observed that some children are handicapped by physical and brain damage resulting from maternal drug abuse and alcoholism and inadequate prenatal care. All children do not learn from their parents the necessary social values and personal skills necessary for education, effective career building and productive employment opportunities. Though some of our beliefs and family traditions are hard to put aside and are sometimes incompatible with other cultural practices, it is necessary to be flexible to the objective realities and adopt some beneficial cultures from our host countries. If the goal is to make us better parents, to show us where we need to bend in order to avoid breaking our children, and ultimately to bring us closer to understanding their world, then, we have to be always tolerant and understanding to the emotions, perspectives and needs of our children.

It is paradoxical that you need a license to drive a car, serve liquor, build a house, own a store, go on a deer hunt, or to be a hair dresser, but you do not need a license to raise a child. It is good to learn that doctors, nurses, pilots, salesmen, plumbers, electricians, teachers, veterinarians, vehicle drivers, and others are licensed for their professional practices. But it is absurd to observe that any person regardless of parenting competency is allowed to have a child. It is clearly elaborated in the words of Great American Comedian, Bill Cosby: If we want to learn how to drive a car, we need to go to driving school as to enable us secure a driving license. But we cling to the irrational belief that biological parents are automatically competent to be legitimate parents in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In a civilized country for almost any profession there is a need for an updated license or certification to do professional job. However, it is fascinating that we are allowed to handle the entire time of building the life of another human being without any related experience or certification of parental skill. As we should be aware, parenthood in itself, unlike any other professional careers is the least developed skill and requires more skills than we can ever master in a lifetime. Sexual reproduction can make us parents only in the biological sense, but the social part of being parents, which involves caring, loving and understanding the psychological make-ups of children, requires professional training and should be certified. Parenting among Eritreans in Diaspora, is more complicated by traditional ways of thinking when it comes to raising children in foreign lands, particularly when we try to mix our culture with the culture we live in. We may encounter quite a serious situation if we don’t try to balance the two cultures and raise our children accordingly. Since most of us left our families when we were very young, we did not have an effective parental training from our families while we become adults (due to recurrent wars and other calamities) and therefore, we have to learn proper parental care from each other in our own established communities and on our own by mere trial and error.

Parenting is vital to the future development and sustainability of a community in particular, and society, in general. Parenthood consists of more than child care; it is a responsible developmental stage in the life cycle that follows childhood and adolescence. It is a divine obligation when parenthood is viewed as a covenant with God. Parenting is an acquired social behavior that requires special training from family and community members. Our parents and communities function as the primary schools for parental training when it comes to raising children. Traditionally, young boys and girls in Eritrea become qualified for parenting by their own parents. Initially, they are taught how to father and mother their children when they were young. Later they are able to enter into marriage, have a family, and establish healthy relationships with their own children. Marriage signifies that they have graduated from their parents’ home schooling and symbolizes that they are certified by their parents and communities to be qualified parents. When they leave their parents’ home to establish their individual families, they are blessed by their parents and communities to raise and cultivate children of high character and discipline. In addition, their parents pray to God to give their married children well-directed and goal-oriented offspring which are of paramount importance in building a strong family and good society. Traditionally, upbringing in the family is the essential prerequisite for upbringing of your own family. Thus, the whole process of raising children and preparing them for adulthood and parenthood signifies a rewarding parenting as a divine grace bestowing from the almighty God.

In Eritrea, children are crafted and molded during the tender years in order to build adults of good character and discipline. As an Eritrean scholar indicated to me such simple wisdom cultivated from years of experience in our family-oriented, traditional society tells us that we have a child rearing practices that we call our own way of parenthood. Obviously, our children and society need protection from incompetent and irresponsible parents who are handicapping our next generation. The time has come to consider protecting children from incompetent parenting by setting parenting standards through our community parental training campaign before they are damaged by abuse and neglect. However, it is impossible to put the family-oriented way of parenting into practice in the absence of solid families and viable communities. Therefore, the continuity of Eritrean society must be assured by instilling our rich culture in every succeeding generation. Imagine what our community would be like if every Eritrean child in Diaspora had responsible and competent parenting. This is not an unrealistic goal if we collectively care about our future welfare and survival of our children. The future of our children in Diaspora matters more than our current discord of our politics and we need to overhaul our thinking mechanism and seek a reality therapy in order to regain our social values and cultural practices. Since parenting is an activity potentially dangerous to children and others, it should require proper community guidance and collaboration of families in preparing well-conditioned children. Though parents own, or at least have natural sovereignty over their children, they still need desperately some community guided proper parental training program as a means to prepare children for life as adults and parents. The initiative and commitment of our scholars and professional elites can play an important role in this endeavor.

If our communities appropriately value parenthood as an important skill in our society, a new paradigm for parenting is needed by revitalizing our priorities and establishing the community based parental training program. A community sponsored training program for parents would demonstrate that our society values competent parenting in which parents indeed would bear the responsibility for rearing their children. It would validate parental rights and focus community programs on supporting competent parenting and on remedying or replacing incompetent parenting. Community guided parenting training program would attempt to prescribe parenting styles and set some minimum requirements for effective parenting. It would hold parents responsible for being competent rather than forcing children to endure incompetent parenting until they show publicly recognized signs of damage. The responsibility would fall on parents to demonstrate their competence before a child is damaged rather than on the local governance to prove unfitness after a child has been damaged. The community guided parental training program would symbolize and implement the rhetoric notion that children have a civil right to competent parenting. It would accord parenthood the status of a privilege rather than a biological right. It would enhance and elevate child-rearing from the realm of caprice, accident, and ulterior motives by according parenthood the dignity and legitimacy it deserves. It would encourage people to become more responsible in their sexual behavior and in child-rearing. The program would not be a birth control measure, although it probably would influence procreation by conveying the message that society holds expectations for safe and decent child-rearing. Parents would be more respectful of their obligations if they had to earn the privilege of participating in community guided parental training program and consequently children would grow up in a stable and safe environment.

Thus, families and communities are the two important elements in formulating appropriate parenting program. Since a community is a collection of families, the cooperation and mutual understanding of families is desperately needed to establish Eritrean communities at the current turbulent and challenging time. Although, it may seem difficult to teach old folks new tricks, we need to collect ourselves together and come to our full senses and learn all what it takes to be responsible and respectful parents and raise our children with care and love. If we want to consider helping each other and raising our children to be the most valuable human resources to themselves and to their communities and if we desire to leave behind the well-disciplined, well-conditioned and goal-oriented second generation Eritreans in Diaspora, we need to solidify our individual families and establish viable and formidable communities.

We need to remember that the ultimate measure of our personality and attitude as rational human beings is not where we stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where we stand at times of challenges and controversy. Thus, it is always right to do the right thing with affection and love for family bondage and welfare of our children. It is evident that not every successful person is a good parent, but every good parent is a successful person. As matured and civilized people, if you have sensible comments to make about my short article, my email is tgebrem@wvu.edu. It is also noble to share your perspective to your fellow Eritreans by sending your responses to the web sites. Thank you and wish you all to have a wonderful holiday season. God bless us all!