By Grace Essen and Shuani
Women are the key to sustainable development and quality of life in the family. The varieties of role the women assume in the family are those of wife, leader, administrator, manager of family income and last but not the least important the mother. Home training can mean many things to many people, but in the context of parenting as concerned here, it can be simply defined as manners and social etiquette taught at home. When home training is missing, everybody including the society suffers the consequences.
I was talking with a mum of 5 the other day. She hadn’t planned to have five children; she wanted a baby girl so badly and after four boys her baby girl finally came. What a joy! Many years have passed and her children are all grown up. But the interesting thing about it all is that her boys are amazing helpers around the house. They do practically all chores in the home and same goes for her girl. They cook all kinds of food except when she wants to cook the soup herself! Not many mums can boast of their children like she did, when in most homes today children are ‘spoiled’ and wouldn’t lift a finger, boys and girls alike.
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She told me she runs classes on baking and cooking and in the course of working with young girls she discovered most of them have no idea what to do around the kitchen. She said with so much pain that we mothers have become so ‘busy’ we have no time to train our children especially our girls. Unlike in our own days, a teenage girl today can’t go to the market, buy food stuff and prepare a decent meal for the family. No thanks to makers of all kinds of instant foods particularly noodles, all she needs do is walk down the street grab a few packs of noodles and there you have a meal! *Sigh.
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Who is to blame for this anomaly? The girl? I don’t think so. We mothers should take the blame for abandoning our responsibility to bring up the child the way she should go. We often assume that somehow our daughters will get to know how to do these things, but can they learn if they are not taught, and then given a chance to try, to make mistakes and learn from them?
We see in local movies and commercials scenes where a young woman would call her mother on the phone to guide her through a meal she is preparing for her husband, and we just laugh it off when that should be a huge cause for concern because that is our reality.
A mum shared the following write up on social media and I thought to share:
Suitors Now Prefer Our Maids To Our Daughters For Marriage Why not?
Yes, it happens because we devote time in training the maids on how to cook well, how to clean the house and on good mannerisms while leaving our own daughters untrained.
We overwork the maids and they adjust with equanimity because they need us to survive.
The maids turn out to manage the indignation and insolence we and our children subject them to. All these make the maids better wives who can manage even the angriest of men.
Our precious daughters are pampered through nursery and primary schools. They speak the English we want and know all the cartoon slangs by heart. We beat the maids blue black if they ever ask our girls to help out in domestic duties. They see kitchen things as maids’ things.
The girls move from boarding schools to the university, do their NYSC, Masters and get a job. Of course, they are ripe for marriage and you wish that to happen soon.
From one relationship to another, the same story. The guys would parade and dump them. They are only good in outings and red carpet functions.
The boys de-commit when they notice that the possible wife cannot cook, arrange things and are very domestically untrained. The rich guys can manage as they would mitigate the handicap by hiring a domestic help. Not all guys can afford this for a start.
The upcoming and very sensitive guys who would make good husbands, fathers and leaders would not manage these parents’ inflicted shortcomings. They would settle for well trained ones. They know the value and the pride in hosting friends at home to delicious delicacies prepared by a wife.
Not all your maids would remain your servants forever. Some of them would finally do part-time studies and like a train, get to their God ordained destinations sooner or later.
Like a perfume, good guys perceive well trained wife materials from afar and dump the daughters of the bourgeois like hot iron. Long time happiness is at stake. No explanation is given. Sometimes, the sack message is made through a social medium.
Let your daughters learn what you teach your maids to make them compete for the few available good men if marriage is important to them. There are few guys who believe that marriage is for better for worse.
Don’t be deceived; love is an active verb. Yes it is. You love; you loved; and you used to love. You can also hate who you used to love. Therefore, some men are immune to pre-marital love blindness.
In practice, love can’t cover the stench of bad early formation of our daughters.
Right now, educated former maids are now cornering better men on offer because they possess the requisite or set skills the highly perceptible and ready husband materials need.
Mothers please take note.
Vital Roles of Women in Family and Society
According to Shuani, a typical woman has vital roles to play:
1. As a wife:
Woman is man’s helpmate, partner and comrade. She sacrifices her personal pleasure and ambitions, sets standard of morality, relieves stress and strain, tension of husband, maintains peace and order in the household. Thereby she creates necessary environment for her male partner to think more about the economic upliftment of family. She is the source of inspiration to man for high endeavour and worth achievements in life.
She stands by him in all the crises as well as she shares with him all successes and attainments. She is the person to whom he turns for love, sympathy, understanding, comfort and recognition. She is the symbol of purity, faithfulness and submission and devotion to her husband.
2. As an Administrator and Leader of the Household:
A well-ordered disciplined household is essential to normal family life. The woman in the family assumes this function. She is the chief executive of an enterprise. She assigns duties among family members according to their interest and abilities and provides resources in-term of equipment and materials to accomplish the job.
She plays a key role in the preparation and serving of meals, selection and care of clothing, laundering, furnishing and maintenance of the house. As an administrator, she organizes various social functions in the family for social development. She also acts as a director of recreation. She plans various recreational activities to meet the needs of young and old members of the family.
3. As a Manager of Family Income:
Woman acts as the humble manager of the family income. It is her responsibility to secure maximum return from every pye spent. She always prefers to prepare a surplus budget instead of a deficit budget. She is very calculating loss and gain while spending money. She distributes judiciously the income on different heads such as necessities, comforts and luxuries. The woman in the family also contributes to the family income through her own earning within or outside the home. She has positive contribution to the family income by the work. She herself performs in the home and uses waste products for productive purposes.
4. As a Mother:
The whole burden of child bearing and greater part of child rearing task are carried out by the woman in the family. She is primarily responsible for the child’s habit of self-control, orderliness, industriousness, theft or honesty. Her contacts with the child during the most formative period of his development sets up his behaviour pattern. She is thus responsible for the maintenance of utmost discipline in the family.
She is the first teacher of the child. She transmits social heritage to the child. It is from mother that the child learns the laws of the race, the manner of men, moral code and ideals. The mother, because of her intimate and sustained contact with the child, she is able to discover and nurture child’s special traits aptitudes and attitudes which subsequently play a key role in the shaping of his personality.
As a mother she is the family health officer. She is very much concerned about the physical wellbeing of every member of the family, the helpless infant, the sickly child, the adolescent youth, senescent parent. She organizes the home and its activities in such a way so that each member of the family has proper food, adequate sleep and sufficient recreation. She made the home a place of quite comfortable and appropriate setting for the children through her talent. Besides, she cultivates taste in interior design and arrangement, so that the home becomes an inviting, restful and cheerful place.
The mother is the central personality of the home and the family circle. All the members turn to her for sympathy, understanding and recognition. Woman devotes her time, labour and thought for the welfare of the members of the family. For the unity of interacting personalities, man provides the temple woman provides the ceremonies and the atmosphere.
The woman performs the role of wife, partner, organizer, administrator, director, re-creator, disburser, economist, mother, disciplinarian, teacher, health officer, artist and queen in the family at the same time. Apart from it, woman plays a key role in the socio-economic development of the society.
Modern education and modern economic life use to compel woman more and more to leave the narrow sphere of the family circle and work side by side for the enrichment of society. She can be member of any women’s organisation and can launch various programmes like literacy programme such as adult education, education for disadvantaged girls etc.
The purpose of introducing such literacy programme is to raise the society as education enables women to respond to opportunities, to challenge their traditional roles and to change their life circumstances. Education is the most important instrument for human resource development.
Women are the key to sustainable development and quality of life. So they should be members of community centre or club to disseminate knowledge about handicraft, cottage industries, food preservation, and low cost nutritious diet to people belonging low socioeconomic status for their economic upliftment. They should act as leaders of the society to raise their voices against women violence, exploitation in household as well as in work place, dowry prohibition superstition, and other social atrocities.
They should be members of religious institutions to deliver spiritual speech to adolescent boys and girls in order to eliminate the juvenile delinquency problem from the society. In addition they have pivotal role in pre and post marital counselling for adolescent girl regarding sexual transmitted disease. AIDS and other infectious diseases. They are supposed to create awareness about human rights, women and child rights, credit facility of bank, different immunization programmes to low-socioeconomic-status people of the society.
Moreover, it is the women who have sustained the growth of society and moulded the future of nations. In the emerging complex social scenario, women have a vital role to play in different sectors. They can no longer be considered as mere harbingers of peace but are emerging as the source of power and symbol of progress.