Whoever said bringing up a child is easy! Today the lack of discipline in certain aspects of my life has certainly come back to bite me in the form of my 12-year old son, Ricky, who all this while has been living with his mum. Now that he’s come to live with me, I’m faced with my own worst enemy...myself. What could be more challenging than getting someone to follow the principle of “Do as I say, not as I do,” particularly in cases where you know that you’re not exactly leading by example. It’s tough, I tell you! One minute I’m telling him to turn off the telly and focus on his homework and the next minute, I’m reaching for the TV remote myself. My intent for my son is well and good, but the more I observe him, the more I feel that he is exactly like me – he would tell me that he WANTS to do something I ask him to, but he won’t end up doing it.
Ricky has good social skills, but his value system is something that isn’t totally in place yet, so he’s at the age basically where he’s testing to see how far he can go. I ask him what time he gets off school and everyday it’s a different answer. Sometimes he says 4.30pm, and then another day it’s 5.30pm, when in actual fact he finishes at 3pm. One day I call him at 4.30pm and ask him where he is, he tells me he’s at school. But then I find out he’s actually sitting in the toilet at McDonalds. Gosh...most days I’m faced with a mental battle as to whether I should use the ‘carrot’ or the ‘stick’ to get him on track. So far I’ve been using the ‘carrot’...making a simple request or giving him an instruction to see whether he follows it. There are days when I threaten him or just start talking to him about his future. The problem is, someday you get to the limits. If you threaten him, you’ve got to carry out some kind of punishment.
Being put in a situation like this makes me think of how mum managed me when I was younger. How did she do it??! We lived on a farm, and she was a single parent, so she was always busy with something. One day I told her I was going next door to see the neighbour’s son and instead I took off with him to the quarry. Well, God has a way of making the truth known, and somehow she found out. She was far from happy! Well, you know how white peas become really hard when you set them out to dry under the sun. She made me kneel on them for 20 minutes. Talk about painful! I can still remember it till today, so it must have made some impact.
Growing up, I was fearful of mum..but it was out of respect, more than anything else. I remember, when I was six I had a taste of my first cigarette. In Poland, at the time, ciggies had no filters, and trying it for the first time at that age, I certainly didn’t like the taste of it, not to mention the fact that it went down the wrong pipe! Arghhh! Never had another ciggy after that. But meanwhile I had to cover up the smell so mum wouldn’t get even a whiff of it. So when I got home after my little escapade, I immediately went into the garden and grabbed a few cloves and popped them into my mouth. Oh...it was strong. When I walked into the kitchen mum could smell the cloves and asked me why I was eating them. I had to lie...told her I loved cloves. So really, Ricky is doing pretty much what I did as a kid. He’s still confused between lying out loud, and learning to manage the truth.
Even today, being a Director requires me to encourage others and push for change. But how do I do this when I’m also part of the problem, thanks to my own lack of discipline. As a leader I don’t have the luxury of questioning myself openly. I have to give others the perception that I am in control...that I know what I’m doing. You think
Vijay doesn’t make mistakes? Of course he does, except that he has the knack of turning his mistake into a positive, and in most cases the best thing he has ever done! Here, I have people walking after me telling me, “Oh Richard, don’t worry, you’re only human!” Sometimes that just puts me back in my comfort zone and makes me feel like it’s alright to make a few mistakes, no harm done. Nothing changes in the process.
At the end of the day, I feel it’s a trial and error process. When it comes to bringing up a child, in some respects we’ve got to have some ground rules. And in some respect we’ve got to make room for some adjustments. If Ricky exhausts all his breaks, and if he fails to follow what I say, he has agreed to be punished. The million dollar question is – can I carry it out?
