Important Areas Parents Should Check This Holiday

Important Areas Parents Should Check This Holiday

By Andrew Mibei

The school holiday is here again and parents are already worrying what to do with their kids now that no teacher is around to rein in the energetic youth. Most of our homes lack proper rules to guide the school going children and most parents have always relied on teachers for discipline especially of the adolescents. There are a number of important areas that parents need to watch in order to ensure that their children are safe.

Parents are advised to carefully check their children’s end of term report prepared by their respective schools. The report is a summary of your child’s sojourn in school and a good parent should always look at the finer details of the report beyond the class position, fees arrears and opening date. Check the teachers’ comments and take appropriate action, for instance, if your child requires more revision in a certain subject, see to it that the revision is provided. Ensure also that the report presented to you is genuine because today’s youth are known to produce their own report forms that suit their parents’ expectations. Talk over the report with your son or daughter in order to get their views, after all it is their life that you are trying to shape so let their opinions come in.

Ensure that your child is exposed to appropriate mass media. The TV set in your house can either be good or bad for your child and you ought to check what he watches and if need be, switch it off during your absence. The presence of cyber cafes poses another challenge to the parents whose children end up getting harmful information through the readily available sites. As a parent, let no child lie to you that teachers give them assignments to do over the internet unless the school is not doing an approved curriculum. Pornographic material will attract an idle adolescent just as the numerous social sites where following and befriending strangers is the norm. Instead of surfing the net, let your child go for a sport or do manual duties at home.

Watch out for drugs in your child’s life. All adolescent are prone to experimenting on harmful drugs and parents are warned against pretending that the vice is for a certain class of people. Be on the look-out for strange friends that attract your child. Be wary when your son or daughter cannot explain how they spent the 1000/= you gave them recently because chances are that it was spent on alcohol.

Without being too snoopy, ensure that your child is not engaging in any form of sex. This is a dangerous field that no school going youth should venture into. Your child should not attend strange parties that are held at secluded locations and at the wrong time of the day. If you can, sit down with your child and discuss this taboo subject this long holiday for them to understand it better.

Finally, parents should be on the look-out for strange religious patterns in their children. Adolescents are introduced into wrong religions during the school term and the long holidays help the cults to take root. Even if you are not a religious person, ensure you know where your child goes for religious nourishment to avoid bringing up a vampire.