How Not to Mentor the Young

You probably may have forgotten the stress you went through when you were really young. We all do. There is a tendency to imagine that pupils, and students in general, do not go through enough stress to cause them anxiety and depression.

Parents, for instance, may assume that the stress that they go through when raising up their children is exclusively theirs. They assume that the kids are, supposedly detached and, supposedly, sailing playfully in their childhood fantasies of Cinderella, the Magic bean stalk, Abdul and Ali baba.

The contrary is true. Young kids as three years old are able to perceive emotions accompanying their adult colleagues. They know, precisely, when to ask for favors and when not. They share your stress levels. This, also, implies that if you persistently expose them to high stress levels, their childhood is, sadly, disrupted.

Their, very human, mind engages a higher cognitive arousal.

The result, like you can observe among street children, is an adult mind in a child’s skull. You may, very well, observe this in your own self if you reflect on your childhood. If your parents were the loving kind, you probably find it easy to empathize with others, who may be either better off or worse off, compared to yourself.

If, on the other hand, your parents were the quarrelling type, you probably suffer the same fate. In this case, you may have issues relating with people, who you perceive to be different from your, most probably warped, standards.

This brings us to exam cheating. The society is skewed towards extremes. If, like the majority of the masses, you belong to the have-nots, education is the most obvious tool of transforming yourself. A fact you can research on.

The Njenga Karume’s of the world are, for obvious reasons like population growth and economic malmanagement, increasingly becoming an endangered species.

The haves belong to the minority. They, in their case, may not find any reason to cheat in their exams. They, after all, do not see education as a tool for transforming themselves. They live in plenty. Their stress is more likely to be elsewhere, like having to join their parents for, what they consider to be, boring holidays.

We, the haves and the have-nots, are, collectively, guilty for contributing to the culture of exam cheating. The reason: little efforts are ever put to diversify. Our kids, in trying to assist us, conspire to cheat. They are attempting to make us happy. To help us deal with the stress we brought up in the first place.

The solution is taking a proactive approach. If a child is, simply, not getting the grades, you also probably could not, do not act, behave or speak in a way to suggest hopelessness in him or her.

There is life, in so many other areas, after all. If you still do not believe, look at the most ‘successful’ amongst your peers. How many can give all their credit to their education achievements?