Keeping Your Child In A Hostel – Barr. Muideen Olalekan Olagunju

If a husband and a wife live together on permanent basis, I fail to see why a child should be shipped off to boarding school, putting upbringing in strangers’ hands. I don’t want to call it lazy parenting. This is especially so in Nigeria where you are never sure of good standards despite the payment of humongous fees.

I can understand having to put a child in a hostel in the following cases:

1) Single parenthood especially if the parent is a male whose responsibility as a father may be hampered by his work schedules.

2) Non-conducive home learning environment, especially in cases of parents living in environments that may too morally toxic for the child to grow. Noisy, violent, combustible environments like markets, red spots or gang lands.

3) Travelling parents. Some parents are perennial travellers due to the nature of their job or lifestyle and may have to leave their children alone for long periods.

Parenting is an INTER-PERSONAL endeavour. It’s a heart-to-heart relationship between a parent and a child. It’s a relationship of observations, questions, clarifications, corrections, coercions, monitoring and mentoring. Leaving these huge responsibilities to individuals who are total strangers with no record of pedigree or antecedents is inherently dangerous. These school minders of the child may the good, the bad and the ugly or a mixture of all. Apart from words of mouth of people who have had their children in a particular school hostel, there is no way of determining if it’s the right thing to do as far as the welfare of the child is concerned.

Let me warn that welfare of the child goes beyond making adequate money, food or provisions available for the child’s stay. The child is at the mercy of children from unknown homes. Bullying, peer influence and even cultism may occur. The terrible thing is that the parents are not there to see the red flags.

In terms of monitoring, you have to ask about the number of staff recruited by these schools to whip the children into line. Sometimes, parents of a single child may have upbringing challenges with their child. It could take parents the energy and wisdom to look after ten children to look after just one yet we seriously expect a small group of school staff to look after many children from different backgrounds.

There are success stories of course. It’s not all gloom and doom but parents must weigh their options well and have the best interests of the child at heart. I attended a secondary school which provided hostel facilities for students. I was a day student. I can say the most brilliant among us were those who stayed in the hostel and they were also students who came from far away places. However, I’m talking late 80s to mid-90s. The world has changed exponentially since then. Caution is the word for parents.

The latest case of Dowen confounds me. It looks on the surface a case of bullying not addressed by the school management. It was not a one-off. The poor boy’s suffering was within the knowledge of the management but they were not on top of the situation. Unfortunately, it has proved fatal.

I am also a bit angry with the father of the child. It’s not for putting him in a hostel but for the way he handled the evacuation of the child from school. He lives in Warri. He is affluent. When he flew to Lagos to remove his child, what he should have done was to check the boy into the nearest hospital. There are many good hospitals in the Lekki area where the school is located. He couldn’t get a flight to Benin or Asaba and then decided to take the boy home by road. That’s at least 9 hours without any form of doctor’s attention on the road. I watched his interview where he described the poor state of the road home. The primary duty upon retrieving the badly beat-up child is to get him to a hospital as soon as possible. When the father got to Warri, he decided to have the family doctor come home to treat the child. I’m sorry, he left a whole lot undone. I don’t understand his concept of care if he didn’t see reasons why the child should be hospitalised first in Lagos to stabilise him. And then to get to Warri by road and then still keep the child at home cast a pale shadow on him. It’s a hard and painful truth but someone has to say it.

There must be repercussions for Dowen’s management if investigations reveal their negligence. Their press release suggesting the boy got injured while playing football may come back to haunt them. A cover-up is compelling evidence of wrong-doing. For the boys who bullied and attacked the young boy, there must be legal consequences as long as they are over 12 years old.

Government should cast glances at how hostels are run. The regulations should be tighter. There must be impromptu visitations by regulatory bodies seeking red flags. Schools found wanting in critical areas should be asked to shut down their hostels.

May God bless the soul of the young boy.