Mothers play key role in how kids grow up

A mother’s job is the hardest one in the world and perhaps the most sensitive. I was looking at three-year-olds running around at the Wave Muscat last weekend. Their fathers were happily drinking coffee in a group at a table not far away from their children. It was the mothers who did the running around to make sure they don’t do any mischief.

That evening, I was watching television and saw ‘breaking news’ flashing on the screen. It was a familiar one. Another young man in his early twenties blew himself up in a suicide mission that killed a few others around him. I cast my thoughts to the group of kids who were running around playing happily that same day.

Then I asked myself this question: what went wrong between that age to the age where these young men commit an act of violence? One thing is for sure. Something went wrong during their childhood.

In Oman, for example, we have many young people falling out of step. They break laws repeatedly. Some of them get straightened up somewhere on their paths to maturity. Some keep walking in the same path of self-destruction until something gives way.

Without any doubt, mothers play a crucial role in how children grow up. But the fathers have a supporting role, which in my opinion, not many men take this responsibility seriously. It is left to mothers to tip the balance to raise a successful child.

However, in my opinion, fathers may tilt the scale the other way and offset the mother’s hard work. This is the crucial part and this is also where things go horrible wrong for the child.

From my own experience when I was growing up, it was left to my mother to do the nurturing. She was the therapist, the nurse, the teacher, the behaviour analyst, home regulator and took care of the discipline at home. A role whose burden never made her crumble under its massive weight.

Our childhood ran like a manual clock with her hands always on the winding key. My father just made the right noises, smiled kindly, sometimes frowned, occasionally shrugging his shoulders but wholly appreciating her role.

Now as father of my own children, I know exactly what it was in the house I grew up. I don’t have the skills or the will it takes to put growing children on the right path, like my father before me. I am not the only one though. There would be men who would like to contradict me. Would it be fair to say behind every successful genius, there is mother behind them? Yes, it is and I am convinced of that.

Again, without sounding too controversial, there is the other side of the line, when a child turns up to be like one of those who fires bullets in the crowd.

Mothers are not responsible for that. Accusing fingers can be pointed at the father. Somewhere down the line the man of the house was not at the right time or the right place in the growing-up period. I do not mean to be harsh to the men but it is a fair analysis.

The origin of violence at home is always masculine. Mothers use a different approach to discipline their children. It is not something they teach them at school. It is a feminine instinct that we men never get to grasp. It starts with the first step the baby takes and never ends until the mother is laid to rest to her permanent abode.

Saleh Al Shaibany

saleh_shaibany@yahoo.com