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A family set-up is crucial for every child’s mental, physical and mental well-being. Most adults, who in their childhood were deprived of a proper family set up, have over the years proven to be bitter members of society who either blame their parents or society for their failures or refuse to take responsibility for their actions.
Most children who grow up without proper care and supervision fall prey to society vultures like rapists, drug dealers, armed robbers just to mention but a few who use them to their own benefit and destroy the child in the process.
When parents decide to divorce for any reason, children are the third party whose best interests are often forgotten. While there are so many reasons which lead to the deprivation of a family set-up to a child, allow me to say death and divorce are the leading causes.
Not much can be said about death as it is inevitable and the custodians of the children can either be better or worse parents to the surviving children.
Let us put divorce into perspective and evaluate the birth parents’ role in depriving their own children of a proper family set-up.
People might agree that some marriages are beyond saving but it is a notion worth considering that the spouses involved would have contributed in making the marriage unbearable. It is common knowledge that squabbles are a characteristic of every relationship but some are caused by unnecessary irresponsible choices made by either party leading to divorce.
When parents make these choices they do so without considering the long-term effects of their decisions to their children.
Such choices are extra-marital affairs, a communication break down within a marriage, long distance relationships; drug and alcohol abuse all which propel domestic violence.
Extra-marital affairs lead to family malfunction, which also leads to divorce, and ultimately the children are the ones that suffer the consequences. Usually, men initiate this problem by thinking they need the next best alternative to their “nagging” wives and look for a small house which consumes much of the man’s free time.
The husband ends up spending little or no time with his family and becomes more of a housemate than a husband to his spouse which on its own is a provocation to the wife leading to a tense home environment.
When children sense the tension between their parents they are grossly affected, with some acting up at school (by bulling others) and performing badly in their academics.
Some children actually get to the point where they run away from home just to seek their parents’ attention for a change.
However, it is saddening that of those who run away from home, half of them do not return and end up being street kids who resort to crime for a living.
The parents in a dysfunctional marriage get busy worsening the situation, sometimes by not talking at all or undermining one another’s relevancy in the home just to prove a point. While they are doing that, little or no consideration is given to the impact their decisions have to their children.
A man can actually reach the point of getting out of the house and move in with the small house but what he does not know is that his better woman can never be his children’s mother in every sense of the word.
In fact, the man would have made it difficult if not impossible for him to support his children.
As evidenced by the history of small houses, they have a way of making someone’s husband neglect his own children while fully supporting theirs and the small house’s extended family.
The issue of small houses is not one-sided as women can also engage in the infamy, exposing their marriages to danger and risk destroying a family set-up for their children.
Most women who are in arranged marriages, long-distance marriages and other marriages of convenience tend to look for other men to keep them company while the husband is physically or emotionally away.
According to the “neighbours verdict”, the wives of long-distance haulage truck drivers and cross-border transporters (omalayitsha) are the main culprits.
Their husbands are said to come home after a very long trip to find them in bed with the neighbour’s husband or the husband’s best friend if it is not the single brother from church. Whoever it is but it is usually someone they both know.
Usually in these kinds of affairs money has nothing to do with it and, as absurd as it sounds, the woman will be the one giving her small house handouts as a token of motivation.
When incidents like these happen, a divorce is imminent and again children of that marriage are often left in the custody of the wife who cannot afford to financially sustain them.
It is also important to state that women these days are over-emphasising the term “women’s rights” and are using it as an excuse to misbehave in a marriage.
Some deliberately engage themselves in various misdemeanours and when a husband tries to reprimand them, they rush to the police and report domestic violence.
A woman can get away with it in the police books but in her husband’s eyes she would have added insensitiveness to her list of negativities.
Already trust is broken in the marriage leading to the couple begrudging each other, an atmosphere not conducive for nurturing a child.
Few women know the importance of being their husbands’ subordinates while the majority of women want to be equal in the marriage, something they call 50-50 without even knowing what that means. Some think it means that your husband does not have to ask you where you have been if you come home at 12 midnight from work when you actually knock off at 5pm.
Some think you should also have a boyfriend if your husband gets too promiscuous and you meet half way in bringing HIV into the marriage and that can only be fair.
I think the issue of women’s rights should be clearly revised as it has led so many women astray with a simple issue of misconception. Their “solutions” end up breaking their marriages.
Research has it that children who grow up unloved and deprived of a family set-up have trust, commitment, moral and relationship issues as adults.
Some even develop a condition called multiple personality disorder — a condition that makes a person think and behave like many people in one.
It is a case of one’s mind trying to compensate who he is with what he could have been or trying to be someone else so as to avoid taking responsibility for your actions.
Some parents make decisions to destroy their own homes and while it seems to be everyone’s best interest at that moment, they would also have succeeded in creating a negative aspect in their child’s personality that dies hard or causes criminal tendencies in that child’s future.
Online Reporter