An African Reckoning with Irresponsible Parenting
There are crimes for which the offender walks free, but the child serves the sentence.
My current state of mind. ‘The Poligamist’( On Netflix). A message from my Father In Law just this morning(whose wise counsel I lean on ever so often), are things that have inspired this piece to be released so quickly. One day I will finish My story. From where most of this is accounted for. I am still living it. Hoping for it to land a truly happy ending. But no matter how hard I try, it is not all in my hands.
An adult lies. A child learns not to trust.
An adult leaves. A child spends years wondering what was wrong with them.
Two adults turn love into warfare. A child becomes the battlefield.
A man plants children in different homes and calls himself a father because his name appears on their birth certificates. A woman repeatedly chooses chaos and calls the consequences destiny. Families conceal irresponsibility to protect adult reputations, while the children quietly inherit confusion, anger, shame and a lifelong fear of being left.
Then society meets those children years later and asks why they cannot remain faithful, trust love, regulate anger, build stable homes or believe that anybody will stay.
We punish the symptom and refuse to interrogate the wound.
I write this as a daughter of a broken home.
I was raised by a single mother who is my EVERYTHING. She carried responsibilities that should never have been hers alone. She gave all three of us love, protection and, most importantly, a safe enough emotional foundation from which I could eventually examine my own fractures honestly.
I will forever honour her strength. But honouring her strength must not require me to lie about the wound.
Her courage did not make the absence inconsequential. Her excellence could not answer every question abandonment planted. A heroic mother can raise an extraordinary child and that child can still carry silent injuries.
I know what it means to struggle to remain grounded. I know the negotiation required to trust people, open my heart, receive love without suspicion, offer kindness without preparing for betrayal, remain faithful, and allow myself to be vulnerable without feeling foolish or unsafe.
I also know how easy it is for the world to mistake achievement for healing.
Some of the most accomplished adults among us are not unscarred. We are simply highly functional survivors. We learnt to convert instability into ambition, rejection into independence and fear into control. We became impressive because being impressive felt safer than being needy. We learnt to need nobody, then wondered why intimacy felt like an invasion.
Success can decorate a wound. It does not automatically close it.
I am not telling my story to indict my past or to present myself as perfectly healed. I tell it because awareness has given me a responsibility. My mother created enough safety for my mind to recognise what happened to it. That recognition has given me the strength to become intentional about my choices—to keep choosing the straight and narrow path, even imperfectly; to choose love when fear would be easier; to choose fidelity when dysfunction could have become my excuse; to choose kindness when hardness might feel more protective; and to ensure, as consciously as I can, that what wounded me does not travel through me into another generation.
Trauma may explain parts of us. It must not be allowed to govern all of us.
But personal determination is not enough. This is no longer merely a private family conversation. It is an African emergency.
I speak of Africa not because dysfunction belongs uniquely to us. It does not. I speak of Africa because I love her, because her future matters to me, and because the continent cannot rise higher than the emotional foundations of the children who will inherit it.
The West may indeed have something to relearn from Africa: that a child once belonged not only to two biological parents, but to a people. Community was not an inspirational slogan. It was infrastructure. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbours and elders formed a moral fence around childhood. Adulthood carried duties, not merely freedoms. Marriage joined responsibilities, not only photographs. A person’s conduct could bring honour or shame beyond the individual because identity was understood as communal.
There was wisdom there.
But let us not manufacture an innocent African past that never existed. Not every tradition protected women. Not every extended family was safe. Polygamy was not imported wholesale from the West; it existed in many African societies long before colonialism. Some such households developed defined systems of duty and belonging. Others produced rivalry, neglect, dispossession and pain—especially where male appetite enjoyed more protection than female dignity or childhood security.
The question is not whether a practice is African or Western. Age does not make a custom sacred, and foreignness does not automatically make an idea corrupt.
The question is simpler and more demanding: What does it do to the child?
We must stop blaming “Westernisation” for every failure while enthusiastically borrowing only the portions of modernity that excuse selfishness. We imported the language of individual freedom but misplaced the discipline of individual responsibility. We learnt to say, “I must protect my peace,” while leaving children to live inside the war we created. We celebrate romantic choice but rarely discuss the moral consequences of choosing whom to reproduce with. We have become fluent in self-expression and increasingly illiterate in self-restraint.
This is not liberation. It is irresponsible adulting wearing fashionable grammar.
Nor is this an attack on single parents.
Single parenthood is sometimes produced by death, danger, divorce, abandonment or a necessary decision to remove a child from violence. One peaceful, responsible parent can provide a safer home than two adults manufacturing terror under one roof. No woman should remain where she or her children are being destroyed merely to preserve the optics of marriage. No man should be condemned for carrying alone what another parent refused to carry.
There is a profound moral difference between the parent who was left holding the child and the adult who did the leaving.
Too often, however, we confuse celebrating the survivor with excusing the person who created the burden. We praise mothers for performing miracles while quietly normalising the men who made miracles necessary. We call women “strong” because it is cheaper than holding fathers accountable. We applaud one parent for doing the work of two, then invite the absent parent to the graduation photographs as though presence can be staged retroactively.
Strength should be honoured. Abandonment must not be sanitised.
The pressure of making your new life look rosy is a pain you alone in your quiet time will endure. The grass is NEVER greener on the other side.
And women are not beyond examination either. Motherhood does not automatically confer wisdom. A child must not become a weapon against a father, a pension plan, an emotional spouse, a witness recruited into adult conflict or the casualty of repeated reckless choices. Some fathers are absent because they fled responsibility. Others have been deliberately obstructed, alienated or reduced to financial machinery. Wherever a parent makes the child pay for resentment against the other adult, the child loses.
Our loyalty must be to the wellbeing of the child—not to the gender of the offender.
Across Africa, the Caribbean and Black communities in the diaspora, we must find the courage to ask uncomfortable questions without feeding racist stereotypes or pretending our pain is imaginary. Historical violence, enslavement, colonial disruption, poverty, migration, incarceration and economic exclusion have all strained Black family life. Context matters. History matters.
But history cannot become an eternal permission slip for present-day irresponsibility.
We cannot demand that the world respect Black life while being careless with Black childhood. We cannot speak passionately about legacy while planting children in homes where love is unpredictable, duty is optional and adults refuse to heal. We cannot blame systems for everything we keep reproducing privately.
At some point, self-examination becomes an act of racial love.
What happens when instability becomes ordinary?
Children begin to interpret anxiety as love because peace feels unfamiliar. Boys learn that fatherhood is biological rather than behavioural. Girls learn to overfunction, accepting exhaustion as the admission price for companionship. Adults choose emotionally unavailable partners because absence resembles home. Pain reproduces with astonishing efficiency.
The wounded child grows up.
The child enters a classroom unable to regulate fear. Enters a relationship expecting desertion. Enters marriage armed for a war that has not begun. Enters leadership hungry for control. Enters parenthood without having been properly parented. Sometimes that child becomes a policymaker, pastor, teacher, employer or president—and an entire society encounters the unresolved wounds of one household.
The abandoned child does not disappear. The child merely becomes an adult with decision-making power.
That is how private irresponsibility becomes public culture.
We see it in our appetite for strongmen, our suspicion of institutions, our inability to disagree without destroying, our worship of appearances, our hunger for validation, and our tendency to confuse fear with respect. Not every social failure begins in the home, but no serious society can pretend the home is irrelevant.
Parents are a child’s first government.
Home is the first country.
It is where authority is first interpreted, justice is first experienced, trust is first negotiated and citizenship is first practised. If the first government is unstable, cruel, absent or corrupt, we should not be shocked when the citizen later struggles to believe in order, loyalty or belonging.
This is why choosing the mother or father of your child is not merely a romantic decision. It is a developmental, psychological, cultural and national decision. Chemistry is not character. Attraction is not capacity. Pregnancy does not transform irresponsibility into maturity. A wedding does not cure selfishness. And a child is not adhesive for a relationship already falling apart.
Before creating a life, adults must ask questions desire often finds inconvenient:
Can this person remain when life becomes ordinary?
Can they tell the truth when lying is easier?
Can they control appetite, anger and ego?
Can we disagree without turning a child into evidence?
Are we emotionally healthy enough to raise someone who will not need decades to recover from us?
And if the relationship ends, can we love the child more than we hate each other?
Parenthood is not proof that two adults once desired each other. It is a lifelong covenant to make that desire answerable to somebody more vulnerable than both of them.
Africa does not merely need more children. She needs more whole children.
Not perfect children. Not children protected from every disappointment. Whole children: children who know they are wanted, who understand that love can be steady, who have permission to speak, who are corrected without humiliation, who are not required to carry adult secrets, and who do not have to earn the presence of those who created them.
Our ancestors spoke often of descendants, names and lineage. Yet legacy is not the number of children who carry your surname. Legacy is the condition in which your choices leave their minds.
A child can inherit your face, your name, your land and your wealth—and still spend a lifetime recovering from you.
That is not legacy. That is damage with documentation.
So this is my appeal to my generation of African parents and to every adult considering parenthood: heal before you hand your wounds a smaller body. Choose carefully. Stay responsibly. Leave safely when staying becomes destructive. Co-parent honourably. Pay what you owe. Show up when nobody is applauding. Stop recruiting children into adult battles. Stop using money as a substitute for presence. Stop calling repeated recklessness a mistake when it has become a lifestyle.
And when you fail—as every parent sometimes will—apologise. Repair. Learn. The authority to parent does not include immunity from accountability.
To those raised inside fracture, we are not condemned to reproduce it. We may carry wounds we did not choose, but healing gives us choices our wounds would rather conceal. We can learn trust slowly. We can practise vulnerability wisely. We can choose faithful love. We can build homes in which peace is not suspicious. We can become the safe adults we once needed.
I am trying.
Not because I emerged untouched, but because I did not.
Not because I always get it right, but because I know what getting it wrong can cost a child.
My mother’s love gave me somewhere safe to stand while I confronted what was missing. I honor my family…..THE COLE CLAN OF VICTORIA ISLAND. As imperfect as we are as a family, From that ground, I continue to choose—deliberately, intentionally, daily—not to hand my pain forward.
Every African adult must now make the same moral decision: Will the wound stop with me, or will I rename it culture, circumstance, masculinity, independence, enjoyment or destiny—and hand it to my children?
We are not only raising sons and daughters. We are raising the emotional architecture of Africa’s future.
The child we destabilise today may become the adult from whom we demand stability tomorrow.
And history will not only ask what we built, earned, wore or posted.
It will ask what it felt like to be raised by us.
A broken relationship between adults must never become a broken foundation beneath a child.
Because children must stop serving sentences for crimes committed by adults.
By Dr. Iyadunni Gbadebo (DIG)
