The Privacy Shift: Navigating Boundaries With Kids

Parenthood is a whole new stage in life and one that requires the parents learning how to be better even when the kids grows older and are out of the house for their own adulthood era. It's not easy and it differ from one parent to another how to raise good and independent kids. I never had a great parental guidance but I learnt from it.

One thing I've come to terms with about parental guidance in Nigeria is that, our parents can be very excessive with how they handle our matters as their children. Once it's not something they have a knowledge about or it's totally new and not from their generation style, they are all invasive and all over the place to put an end to it.

Privacy is one of our rights as humans but obviously, that right is for humans who can think for themselves and act according to their choices. It's not a right for little kids who need to be told everything they need to do. The role of parents is to guide their children to be better people out there and that includes being invasive.

Being invasive as a parent depends on a lot of factors like the age, the gender of the child, the environment and the level of intelligence of the parents. From my personal experience, these things affected me a lot in growing as a child. I can say I had little to no privacy in my life till I got older, almost adult. These were some reasons.

For parents, they want the best for their child and they can't afford to see their children go the wrong path when there are better ways to follow. But the way they go about making these corrections have always been imperfect as many do not try to understand their children but just keep imposing on the children, their own styles.

I'm not a parent yet and I know my turn will not be perfect but thinking from the perspective of being a child under parents who didn't do perfectly in their parenting, I think I know to an extent where to make amendments and do a better job for my kids in the future. One major thing is knowing when to give my kids privacy and when not to.

Children are bubbly, curious, smart, agile and very active so it only makes sense that they would want to try so many things they didn't know before. Especially at a very young age, below the age of 6, they can not be left alone to decide what they try or not because they are almost unaware of the dangers in some of these things.

I've noticed that the teen age is the time that parents need to be more careful when to invade or not, it is a time they learn for their adulthood and also a time they make most of the mistakes that will influence how they lead their adult age. Leaving them to make their own choices at this stage is not out of place but with good vigilance.

It's great to make friends, have personal and study plans alone, parents should be happy to see that but when the environment is not at good standard of influencing your child right, the parents need to be more vigilant while giving them the right amount of privacy they deserve. I'm sure this privacy invasion will be appreciated by kids who have become friends to the parents.