Chief executive officer (CEO) and founder of A Mother’s Love Initiative, Hannatu Ewenmadu, has said the society must work together to stop the Hurried Child Syndrome that is associated with mental stress and low emotional intelligence when children are rushed through school.
According to her, many parents seek to create “super kids,” pressuring their children into becoming premature adults and making them overly-competitive. Ironically, she continued, in their eagerness to create an academic prodigy, overzealous parents often create an underachiever, adding that when these children fail to live up to their parents’ expectations, they become so anxiety-ridden that they cannot perform.
To this end, Enwemmadu said as the future of the nation, parents must join hands to protect and nature these children so as to tap into the very best of their potential.
Ewenmadu, who said this on the occasion to mark the May 27 Children’s Day, explained that, children who suffer the stresses of adulthood because they were ahead of their time, will also exhibit the ailments of adulthood.
To complicate matters, she said many children have blocked their learning skills because of anxiety-promoted memory lapses and an exaggerated fear of failure.
“Based on the research we did, we are saying when you hurry children through childhood, it has an impact on their social, emotional development and which goes back to also affecting them as a person as they progress.
“Because we are hurrying our children, you see children around the age of eight in secondary schools after skipping a whole four years in primary school and it has a huge impact on a Nigerian child which also affects our country.
“Like we said earlier we need to sensitise our people, we need to educate, we need to re-educate them on the implications on the verge of hurrying the children.
“We also call on the society to concentrate on child- focused interventions, since children are fast becoming endangered species in Nigeria with the spate of abductions in schools and all manner of vices children are exposed to in Nigeria.”
For this reason, she said her organisation since incorporation, had been taking proactive steps to change the Nigerian child’s narrative, and had been employing various strategies such as child development advocacy, psycho-education, preventive and remedial interventions, reorientation, professional counselling, documentaries, and institutional/community support services to relate its messages at various levels of the society.
Also speaking during a panel discussion to mark the Children’s Day organised by the NGO, and anchored by Nollywood star, Segun Arinze, a development specialist and teacher at the Lagos State Ministry of Education, Adeyemi Adebayo, explained that it is impossible to accelerate emotional maturation.
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