I’ve had to dig into my search history to find
who the author of my yesterday’s read was. Helen Taylor, sad it as it may
sound, only learned about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation,
in her 50s. She carefully broke down how much she overextended herself to feel
validated. That it was impossible for her to have peace, if it was not from
doing something for someone even when it was emotionally or physically costly
on her part. She said in her article “Psychology
says people who measure success by inner peace instead of outer accomplishments
make fundamentally different life
decisions - and they’re almost never the
ones seeking validation” that she tallied accomplishments like a nurse would,
when it comes to counting vitals. Helen says that even with the multiple performed
forms of success, like paying her mortgage on time, completing her shit without
incident and having her daughters fed
and clothed and launched into the world, she was didn’t feel settled.
Speaking from my childhood/teenage experience,
children do not have much to live for to attain any form of peace save for
being on the right side of their parents, a safe home, good performance in
school and healthy friendships. In many cases, this does not require any kind
of hard work but in some, the people pleasing proclivities and the 24/7 anxiety
to be perfect are deeply ingrained into children by their parents and the homes
they come from.
I still shudder at the thought of my primary
school classmates. They were twin girls. Kaitesi and Kabatesi. We coexisted
with them in school like normal kids but every time their father came, we got
scared for them and with them. Theirs was not a regular parent. He visited with
only a cane and threats – not even a sweet. In retrospect, this man seems to have
hated his children. He never carried anything for the girls but a cane and
threats. Whenever he came, they asked us to pray for them. The girls told their
story over and over again and we learned that their mother was a way and that
in their home was a step mother who gave birth to their baby brother who then
must have been about 4 or 5 but the elders in the home never hesitated to
compare them to him.
They presented a home that did not lack in material
needs and yet in all my life, they were the first and last people I ever saw
with half quire books. Their story suggested that they were treated like second
class citizens in their own home. They have an uncle, a brother to their
father, who is one of those prominent priests in Kampala and probably Uganda at
large. He visited them once. He had shopped for them. The memory of this still
delights my heart. They spoke a lot about him and so last year when I saw him
from a distance, I almost walked to him to thank him for having been a source
of joy in the lives of his distressed nieces.
I do not know how these girls performed in
their Primary Leaving Examinations but you and I already know that even if they
did not fail, insults must have rained on them but I also wonder if at all
their emotional health allowed room for them to excel. These girls had been
conditioned from childhood that they were not enough. They lived a life that pushed
them into a cycle of anxiety. I do not know what their teenage experience
looked like and I often wonder what kind of adults they morphed into.
They may not have articulated it to be
something that weighs heavily on their mental health and it could also be the
same case for my Senior 1 to Senior 2 classmate who attempted to die by
suicide. And yet, while we grew up, adults said children do not have problems
as long as they have basic needs. It has also just dawned on me that the list
of basic needs that we recited as kids was majorly tangible things - all 5 of
them; Water, Food, Shelter, Clothing & Sleep – as if children do not have psychological
and emotional needs.
It is 2026 and more of children dying by suicide are being registered and like the adults of the past, we have quickly decided to conclude that children of nowadays are just spoilt. Others ask “How come children then, never died by suicide”. They did honey! It just never got to the news and as kids, we were not as exposed as the children of this generation are. All we had were our friends in the neighbourhood and school but the children of this generation are now handling unsupervised phones, learning all the destructive coping skills. Our parents, too, still had a semblance of presence as opposed to how the largest percentage of kids nowadays are regulated by screens and God knows what…while we demand results from them, the exact way our parents did.
This is not to say that academic achievements
are irrelevant but have you ever paused to ask yourself what emotional skills you
have equipped your child with to balance out the pressure that comes with academic
expectations?
Last year I was part of the X-space which I
think was organised by Daily Monitor and one of the speakers said that many
children when they do not attain a good result for their national exams,
attempt or die by suicide. This made sense even when I had not followed up on
the pattern. While the other Sunday caught me off-guard, that run-away-from-home-boy
asking me to be his guardian did not surprise me. He said he had run away from
home (in Mbarara) because the points he got would embarrass him and by extension,
embarrass his parents. He did not seem to have any relative to confide in
either when I asked him for someone we could call.
I was lucky I managed to involve a priest who
was skilful enough to get him to share a friend’s number. While it was not the
exact goal, we were glad we saved him from the homeless status - wandering
Kampala streets.
The following morning, one of the priests I had
spoken to about the boy’s case, sent me a link to a tiktok post in which a
school whose name I do not remember condoled with Mengo SS for the loss of one
of their students who died by suicide. It is said that instead of the 20 points
perfect score, she got 19. 19 maahn! She did not even fail but I wonder what
kind of conversations she had with her peers, teachers and family members. Who
demanded the 20 points? Who told her she would be worthless if she did not
score the perfect 20? What rhetoric was she exposed to? Could it be that the
parents were not attentive enough to see what competitive patterns they had to
snap her out of?
Where we did not see many of these stories while growing up, more kids are being exposed to suicide as the ”way out”. As adults therefore, it becomes more costly for us to only sit back, point fingers and nod in agreement to the “Children of nowadays” exclamations without getting our “hands dirty”. We should equip ourselves with emotional resilience skills and equally impart them in our kids. This works starts with us largely because “you cannot give what you don’t have”. We need more mental health conversations and interventions in schools – not as a onetime task to be ticked off a list but something continuous to bolster the young generation’s mental fitness.
