Parents be guided: Children are not a financial investment

Meanwhile, Nakuya has a family with two children and she is expected to cooperate as a partner and contribute to bills at home. She also has goals she wants to achieve individually. 
“I am overwhelmed. Can I say no to my parents’ financial requests? But if I do, who will take care of them? I barely save because my finances are scattered. I go to work but I am always broke. I have nothing to show for all these years,” she adds.    
Children have for long been regarded even as parents’ retirement plans in Africa. The hope boat capsizes upon the shock of loss; a failed investment. Loss occurs when the untimely death of a child deprives the parent of the opportunity to reap off the child’s sweat, or children graduating from university and joining the enormous cluster of unemployed youth. 

Even some of those that masquerade to be employed, in actual sense, are struggling to afford basic needs of life; food, shelter and clothes. The other uncategorised lot ends up doing drugs and getting wasted at a time when they are supposed to be productive and start on the foundation of building solid careers.   

According to www.forbes.com, black tax refers to a practice where a successful black individual supports members of their immediate and extended family financially. It is a common occurrence among first generation graduates, who feel obligated to add the financial burdens of members of their families. 

This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the individual to not only maintain their status financially, but to grow it with very few resources which can increase financial stress or financial anxiety. 

The more, the better. Less is compromise
In business, the amount of money one invests will likely determine the volume of returns. On this scale, if a parent took their child through Universal Primary Education (UPE), a below-average standard secondary school and a higher education facility, the amount of returns often expected, should be of lower standard compared to the those from a child, whose parents invested in an affluent daycare, educated in a high-end primary school, a state-of-the-art secondary school and a Harvard for college. This is how it works with investment.  

But were children ever meant to be considered investments? This business does not add up in reality. The UPE cow could end up producing more milk. Besides, if a child grew up to do just enough to sustain their own survival, will a parent regard them as a loss? 

How better should parents regard their children as investments?
A child is a special gift that a parent should regard as a continuity of their legacy; a life to carry on their parent’s principles, character and personality. This is a parent’s return if they must regard their child an investment, not capital value, not tangible money, nor expectation of a house from child, or paid health insurance.

Your legacy is your child sharing about your wins 70 years after you are gone. If your soul had the chance to hang in the air listening and watching, you would be proud as a parent. 

People die, after all, and no one may honour your life when you are out, but legacies are important because whereas time cannot be controlled or manipulated, a legacy brings you through the elements of time into the future.

If your legacy can inspire the next many generations, you have cracked the code to living through time- that is a successful investment. We can still talk about your great grandfather when you have probably never met him.

An older person would, however, contest the lowered scale of the quantifiable monetary gain. Rhoda Nakandi, 60, insists that children must take care of their old and weary parents as a way of role sharing or giving back, as this is the balance of a family and an expression of love and appreciation to their parents, which culturally cannot be contested. 

In Africa, there is little room to reason with a child. It is the pride of the true African parent.

Are parents willing to reason with their children?
Often times, parents feel that they have a complete right over their children’s choices and that children are subordinate to their will.

Parents hold the responsibility to institute a framework of their children’s course of action and thoughts, right from birth till death do a family part. Also, most parents tend to recognise their children as young ones regardless of their current age. At 50, one is still regarded a child of their parent and must in fact behave as such. 

This factor often closes open sharing and parents’ ear to their child’s suggestions or opinions regardless of how factual those opinions might be. If a child insists, alas, they have stepped on their parent’s grey. Many parents are often aggravated, they say statements like “Ono gwe bakazaala wano juuzi” (he that is recently been brought forth) or ”Nze eyakukyuusanga empaale” (I changed your diapers) and so on. 

Do parents assess their children by the standards they set themselves while they too were younger?
It is only fair that a parent reflects on their own trail of accomplishment from childhood to adulthood; the milestones attained in your childhood, how you achieved your success, the factors that built your character, what was achieved in a given year or period of time, so that you are not burnt by the fire of success but rather had you stand tall and embrace the light of your triumphs, and the timeline that scaled the heights of your desired or acquired livelihood. 

These are viable and realistic aspects of reflection from which a parent ought to measure their expectations against their child as an investment. If as a parent, there was a lot of compromise in your path among these aspects, you probably must not hold such a high regard for your child in terms of returns on your investments. 

Children, after all, are the full responsibility of their parents. Whether or not a child makes it in life, it does not make them a parent to their parent. 
Is experience the best teacher?
“Ojja kukula olabe” (You will grow to appreciate what I meant) is a common statement made by parents that sounds as a threat to many youngsters. It is usually the baseless contour that parents imagine will put a child in line anyway, even as the child doubts that they must follow a certain pattern of experience, following in their parent’s footsteps.

There is a significant number of children’s lived experiences that their parents have not. Bit by bit, trends are lived and pass as new generations and regimes are born.

Communities diversify and expand, economies grow and fluctuate, technologies are invented, reinvented and adapted, education advances and is restructured. Life is not a sequence we all go through from point A to Z and in order. We live differently, feel differently, internalise variably, react uniquely and adapt exclusively. 

Life has no particular blueprint; experiences vary from individual to another. Experience is the best teacher for each individual in their lifelong journey but might not be as much for other individuals as it is to you. 

Your child might not benefit much from your personal experience but be guided toward the right direction from the insights from your experience. Your child might struggle with obesity, while you struggled with malnutrition. But parents keep selling the experience-best teacher muffin. 

Have parents gone through it all? 
Three and more parents state that their children needed them for reference through their lives, since they had faced all in life, which proves their wisdom and guidance as their investment into their children, to make them expect moral returns. This frame of mind has plenty of truth to it as much as inadequacies, since it upholds as abstract speech rather than factual.

Each parent has gone through a unique journey from childhood, which their child might not even relate to, which demystifies a limitation in a common statement by parents, “I have seen it all.” 

A parent and child might have similar but inexact experiences. The beauty about life is that many lessons may teach character from which the knowledge obtained can be passed on to our younger generations. 

Meanwhile, life is filled with variations of how different outcomes can arise from different generations, having a common encounter - walking the earth. Society might have set a standard towards individuals, which determines how the journey of their lives must be. 

However, you are not your parent, whose survival could have hinged upon a pivot of scheming to survive hunger. So, their dream was only as big as attaining a large farmland for food. You, on the other hand, were preached the gospel of education for a bright future, and so wringing the book and quenching your thirsty whims with as much book knowledge as you can, is all that has ever mattered in your quest for survival. 

Your great grandchild, however, might be in for a climate change war and all the innovation he will encounter, will be to pull their focus off the damned metaverse technology, that promises complex simplicity back to the raw troubles of the universe, on which humanity survives. 

So, what is the primary intention of bearing children?
The existence of a child must not be seen as a burden. It is an immeasurable luxury.  If this luxury can stop surviving off your pocket as a parent and sustain its own survival, that is enough to regard your child as a successful investment.  
If you are looking for someone to work for you and help you afford your needs, when you have run out of gas, is that an investment or a slave? You give birth to a child for genetic continuity of your lineage; the joy that you brought forth a human being with your ways, your character, principles and morals. 

If you want money back, put it on land, private property, invest in business or stocks. But if you expect something in return from a human being of your bloodline, the sole purpose for you giving birth to that child was never to get back some sort of profit. You desired a human connection, legacy, reflection of your personality and character in another person.  

An investment, therefore, is supposed to give you returns, but a child investment could reward you as a parent in terms of emotional satisfaction, family pride, ego boosting, community respect and legacy continuity, rather than monetary terms. Children giving back to their parents is by natural law, courtesy, not a debt, not entitlement.

An investment or 
a slave?
If you are looking for someone to work for you and help you afford your needs, when you have run out of gas, is that an investment or a slave? You give birth to a child for genetic continuity of your lineage; the joy that you brought forth a human being with your ways, your character, principles and morals. 
If you want money back, put it on land, private property, invest in business or stocks. But if you expect something in return from a human being of your bloodline, the sole purpose for you giving birth to that child was never to get back some sort of profit. You desired a human connection, legacy, reflection of your personality and character in another person.