First of all, I would like to put it out there that I do love my parents, and although some of you might find some of their disciplining method a bit too extreme, you have to understand that we all are from different part of the world, and I do understand that different people have different ways that they do things, especially when it comes to disciplining their kids.
I personally wouldn't have written this disclaimer if the majority of the audience here were Nigerians who lived in Nigeria, because then the things I'm about to say wouldn't sound strange, extreme or "evil" to you.
With all that said and done, I remember the first time I found out that kids in the western countries don't get disciplined like we do, I was left dumbfounded because I couldn't see how always trying to talk to your kid or placing them on timeout was enough to get them straight.
I remember telling my brothers that if we were brought up this way, that I wouldn't be scared of doing most stuff that I was warned not to do by my parents because I know that the worse they could do to me was to seize all of my gadgets and ask me not to leave my room for the next few days.
You see over here, the fear of what a parent would do to their kid when their kid messes up, helps to keep that kid in line. They were days where I woke up in the middle of the night due to the sound of commotion of my siblings trying to run to safety from my father's cane because of the offence they had commited the previous day.
There was this one time where he had to put pepper in my eyes because according to my school report card, I had missed school for seven days during that term. It is funny now that I do think about it, but back then, it was crazy. I guess he thought as much as that was the last time he did something like that.
What was more sad was the fact that I didn't miss any day of school, I was just a serial late comer in school back in the day, so on most days, they would have taken attendance in class before I got to school... And because I wasn't in class when the attendance was taken, I would be marked absent from school.
But you see, the funny thing about this whole thing is that I've heard my friends tell stories of what their parents did to them to discipline them, and most times I find myself thanking my stars that my dad wasn't as brutal as that. Especially my friends who had parents who were in the military..those guys have crazy stories to tell.
It got to a point where my dad started to realize that his method of discipline was started to affect our father-son relationship, so he had to step back and dropped his cane. But that wasn't the end, he only switched methods.
Rather than flog us like he normally would, he switched over to punishments but in a unique kind of way. He started making us fast (go a day or two without eating). Whenever we messed up, he would ask us not to eat for that whole day and that would be our punishment.
The thing though about that punishment was that it was very easy to find a way around it, all we had to do was wait for him to go to work, eat and then pretend like we hadn't eaten. The only downside to that though was that if you weren't a good actor who could pretend that he was hungry even when he wasn't, you would get in trouble with my dad when he comes back from work and doesn't find you looking miserable because he would just assume that you had disobeyed his order and went behind him to eat.
Anyways, as time went on, he eventually stopped disciplining us because honestly, he didn't have to anymore. We all knew what the man was capable of and no one dared to do anything that would make him go back to his old self. We all behaved the way we were supposed to and that made him happy, and it made us happy too.
But in as much as I genuinely feel that his method was very effective, especially on me, there are certain things that he did that I wouldn't do, but the last thing I would do is to drop the cane totally and fully adopt the "talking to the kid or timeout" method. Forgive me for saying this but that isn't our way of doing things here, and I know that everyone is either woke or pretending to be woke these days, trying to copy everything the western people do, I wouldn't do things that I feel would jeopardise my kids future...because look at me, I may not be at where I want to be in life yet, but I also am not a criminal or done anything a wayward person would do, I'm straightforward and I genuinely think it's all thanks to how I was raised.
You might disagree with me, I understand and respect that but like I said at the beginning of this article, different people, different methods.