The Sunday News
Herbert Taruwona Mbindi
Life gives us situations from whence we acquire experiences. Schooling was one such situation. The six or four years you were in school gave you varied experiences. You met and developed network of friends and associates. You learnt so many subjects with different attitudes and responses to each. You led or were led. Also you experienced authority in class and outside class.
There were so many school activities to partake in –indoor and outdoor activities. You purposefully participated in them. Others might have disdainfully avoided them preferring mischief and adventure! Essentially schooling allowed you to acquire and build knowledge. This process should, necessarily, have nurtured you to become useful in society and to the country. As a result, you must be able to look and think ahead with hope, enthusiasm and great sense of purpose. You should be able to commit yourself towards improving your standard of living.
This, you can only do if you are able to read opportunities that come your way. You need to develop the right optimism hence focus on positive thinking. Through that you take every experience in life as challenges to critically think and learn hence become able to make informed choices. Accept it- success in life doesn’t come easier. You work for it.
Results versus expectations
The results you attained may fall short of your own as well as your parents’ expectations. As a result, you despaired. You got disappointed. More often the parents are disheartened worse. Such reactions are unhelpful much as they are unnecessary. Admitted, they are normal emotional and psychological ways to react to an outcome. In doing so we need to accept the simple reality that life goes on. Both yourself and your parents must be realistic hence appreciate as the West Africans reason; crying can be us but it doesn’t help.
Instead appreciate the negative result might attract scrutiny as a deviation. Accepted, failure is the inability, for whatever reason or reasons to satisfy standards thereby resulting in a goal being unsuccessfully pursued. During examination preparation and taking learners commit themselves to receiving positive outcomes. Parents and other agencies of social control provide requisite support.
The advice is that, whereupon an unpleasant result is achieved, both parents and the child must seek effective counseling and guidance. In doing so the parties are assisted to manage their social prestige and preferences. Through that they are able to look at alternative options previously unthought of.
Both the parent and child must leave home to seek guidance on way forward
Such an approach does not only provide clear relief to the two parties but it assists in providing the much-needed comic relief. In doing so, the parties work towards shared joy. And, an accomplishment on the child’s self-esteem. There is an urgent need to assist the child feel that she or he will succeed, since she or he once succeeded.
Equally this approach would help the child more but the parent as well in appreciating the steps in the long and arduous journey to tertiary education. Done well the guidance and counseling especially with respect to alternative pathways would assist in closing the gap of the false-expectation of an unbroken chain of achievement and success.
Otherwise the chain turns out to be a victim of its own popularity. The excruciating feeling of loss of self-esteem and depression suffered by the child need to fully witness so that it is better appreciated as the child might feel that the world has come to a standstill.
Your child’s future matter most
Research has shown that the girl child is more susceptible. She reacts to failure a lot differently. For instance she might go for days without food and isolate themselves from the company of their friends. Others resort to drug abuse. To further compound the situation, still others show withdrawal symptoms. If this happens the child might opt to remove herself from the community. The boy child is not spared either.
Upon receiving results children need lots of help in finding an inner source of calm. Through career guidance and counseling children, especially upon getting negative results, get sharing on human struggles which would ideally help them stay focused in all future learning situations.
Through such guidance they are helped to move from fear to curiosity hence develop a feeling of more self-acceptance when facing difficulties. Furthermore, guidance and counseling enable the child to successfully adapt to stress, including becoming able to focus away from the current problem as well as dealing with adverse emotions associated with stress.
Mainly so, the child as well as the parent are assisted with identifying alternative pathways to achieving their career goals. This allows them to recover from failure itself a critical step towards disentangling stress, a complex and multifaceted problem.
Parents should not superimpose themselves on children. Instead they should appreciate that today’s children belong to a different generation. They see, respond, react and think differently to yesteryear children. They need a different kind of management approach.
The distillation points in school life
In school life distillation points refer to every exit level – that is Grade 7, Form 4, Form 6, every final degree level.
These distillation points serve different but consistent purposes. Essentially, they are decision making points. Either you consolidate lessons learnt or decry them. The decision you make either makes or breaks you. Who, why and how you involve others in your decision-making process is a critical success factor. Furthermore, your confidence, self-esteem, focus, preferences are shaped and re-shaped at these exit points.
The decisions are either wise or unwise hence it is necessary to seek proper guidance. Life choices and their execution as well as implementation is basically based on how, what, why as well as when you think! What is required is you must have a burning desire to become what you want to become in life. But be advised life does not have a formula but a focus.
The parents-teachers factor
While our children go to school and bring back different types of reports as parents we develop certain expectations of the possible performance of the child. We also derive an understanding of the abilities and challenges of our child.
Through that we formulate plans about the child’s future. For some parents they see themselves through the child hence they then want to achieve what they failed to do in school and life through the child. As a parent you wanted to become a lawyer, an accountant, a journalist, a sales person and so forth. You failed therefore you might be tempted to aspire to achieve this dream through your child. The strongest advice is DON’T DO THAT
Equally teachers much as parents may contribute to children’s failure in school. One problematic way they do so is through labeling. Both might use lots of generalisations to describe the child’s performance in school as ‘not-normal’.
The learner then reacts negatively to such descriptions thereby developing a low self-image and self-esteem.
There is need for both teachers and parents to exercise empathy instead of non-empathy in their dealings and engagements with learners. It is a fact that, in most cases, instructions to empathize help the child to develop a disposition for success. Schools that still do streaming need to relook at this approach as it has some generalisations that could affect a child’s future career1
Help children cope with the stress of failing
Immediately children get their national examination results they need lots of help –especially where the results were bad or unpleasing- so that they cope with the associated stress hence become able to reduce the psychological states associated with stress. Through such help the examination-results holders get social support and interpersonal cognitive problem-solving abilities that allow them to develop resilience.
In giving this help it should be observed that there are gender-related personality attributes and reactions to success or failure. It has been observed that failure has debilitating effect on most females than males. There is need for gender-appropriate approaches to helping children cope with stress. In doing so appreciate that boys are failing as they face challenges relating to reading and writing.
Remember they are drawn more towards video games and pope culture. Admitted females also have their own digressional habits as well.
Good news to the girl child –empowering HER
In its efforts to empower the girl child Trust Academy starting this month of May shall be giving a five percent discount on tuition fees to all girls who enroll with the college for any course. As a college we are convinced women play a critical role in the achievement of sustainable development goals. We believe that this initiative should add to several efforts by other players to enhance the girl child’s decision making capacities at all level in all spheres of life.
As a college we want to empower the girl child through education and training as critical ways of enhancing their knowledge, skills and self-confidence.
This article is prepared and presented in the interest of providing free career guidance and counselling to all people who value education and training as a critical cornerstone to success in life. Trust Academy invites all people, with or without O levels as well as degree holders who have a dilemma or are unsure of what career path to pursue to visit their offices on number 52 FORT STREET between 3rd and 4th avenue for FREE career guidance. Alternatively, WhatsApp Herbert 0773 616 665/0712212179
