The Crushing Weight of Family Expectations
There’s an iconic scene in the movie, Sparkle, which resonates with our cultural code of conformity.
Sister brings Satin, her comedian suitor, (a rather arrogant and boorish man) for dinner.
Emma, her mother, (played by the late Whitney Houston) makes her dislike for Satin known to everyone at the table with her remarks:
“Child, I think enough of you to introduce you … to dentists and doctors and accountants. But no, not you. You want to whore with this coon… get older not desperate!”
Sister, visibly offended by her mother’s words lashes back with the savagery of a wounded cobra:
“Desperate? I’m doing a whole lot better than you ever did. You know, just keeping a man is a whole lot better than you ever did.”
She completely unraveled the complicated relationship she has with her mother:
“It’s not my fault that she got knocked up at 16 and is still trying to convince folks that she’s the perfect mother … raised some good girls. Sparkle’s gonna follow up behind you, and be a little church mouse and make dresses. And if she’s lucky, she’ll be a preacher’s wife.
“Dee’s gonna be a doctor and I’m just supposed to marry one? Funny thing is, maybe I could have snagged one if you’d sent me to school like these two. But instead, I was at home, raising your kids … while you were laid up in your own vomit.”
As Sister (played by Carmen Ejogo) said these words, tears streamed down her face.
You could see that the cat she let out of the family bag was an old, deep and bitter one. It’s inevitable for such a “cat” from the past to not bring along much pain and regret.
This plot is actually an underbelly of living up to cultural and familial expectations without living one’s own truth.
Much of the wrong steps Sister took can be laid at the feet of her mother’s past failure: both women were trying to placate the society to deflect the rejection from their pasts.
Few months ago, as I was discussing with my students, I realized the blighting impact parental manipulation can have on young people and their self-identities.
These were teenagers who were visibly bogged down in their career choices by the weight of parental expectations.
Like Emma in Sparkle, many Nigerian parents have a tripodal career reductionism for their children: Medicine, Engineering or Law. If you don’t happen to fall within these three study circles, you are not there yet.
I don’t have a specific statistic on this, but I’d say that majority of Nigerians didn’t study a university course that resonated with their innate abilities, passion and choices.
For many, their course of study was dictated by overbearing parents, uninformed teachers, myopic counselors and manipulative clerics.
There are other shallow reasons people adduce for studying a course they shouldn’t have normally touched with a 20 feet pole, but the bottom line is that, many have never lived a self-fulfilled life. Right from the cradle, they were merely raised to live as a clone of someone else. Most of the time, their family.
Many parents don’t ever care to know and assess the intellectual, psychological, emotional and relational capabilities of their children before thrusting a doctor/lawyer/engineer expectation on them.
Now we’ve ended up with doctors who should have been zoologists; lawyers who should have been entrepreneurs; engineers who should have been entertainers; geographers who should have been journalists; biochemists who should have been actors; microbiologists who should have been bankers and computer scientists who should have been farmers.
Who is losing at the end? The society! We simply have no idea of how many artists, thinkers, marketers and psychologists we have lost to the wrong career.
These were people who could have made immense positive contributions had someone directed them toward the right path.
On a flip side, we simply have no idea of how many people would have been alive today or living productive lives if they hadn’t allowed a proverbial square peg in a round hole operate on them.
In many cases, people just pass through the system — following all the motions to please someone else — when their passion and zeal actually lie in a totally different field. They just breeze through life labouring under the crushing weight of someone else’s ideals.
And I pointed this out to the students I was counselling: many parents try to live their lives through their children. It’s not only unjust but also a violation of the rights of their children.
A father, who due to financial or intellectual reasons, never attained his dream of becoming a judge, now tries to goad his daughter to become a lawyer so he could gain through her, a degree of prestige he never had.
A public health worker, who has always felt inferior to medical doctors now tries to shore up her self-image and self-confidence by manipulating his son to become a doctor; to “show” the society that she, too, is a mother to a profession that used to intimidate her.
Many of such parents project the ease of their time onto the present, and then live the life they never had through their children instead of allowing them discover and choose their own career paths.
One of these teens told me that his father was trying to cram Medicine and Surgery down his throat, even though his interest is in Information Technology. Now, he didn’t make the required cut-off mark for Medicine.
Another told me her mother made her choose Medicine and Surgery for her JAMB exam with the pretext that she once said she wanted to be a doctor as a child. But she didn’t also make the cut.
Yet, another student was been pressurized by his father to study Estate Management while he wanted to study Law. Thankfully, he ironed out that issue with his dad.
I know the academic capabilities of these students and I wonder why they are being pressured into studying courses far beyond their abilities.
The end result will be similar to the scenario I relayed at the outset: a bitter adult silently or openly blaming the parent for robbing him/her of a fulfilled life.
If you are at the junction of either following your personal dream or a dream someone thinks is yours, first, look within you to see if the latter really suits your abilities, passion and potential.
Second, don’t be sentimental about your decisions. Question your own motives. Is this about your own ego? Fame? Public expectation? Family name or prestige?
Third, is the person dictating your career choices well updated on current job market realities?
Is he/she being sincere or has a hidden agenda?
Is he/she offering you to study a course he/she wished he studied?
What level of experience does he/she have about that field of study?
I’m always amazed how people rush in to study courses like Microbiology or Biochemistry without being made aware of its limited relevance in the Nigerian job market.
Most of these undergraduates apparently got misinformed by an equally misinformed family figure. Get proper counselling from someone in the know.
The hoary Nigerian claptrap that “parents are always right” should be discarded. Adults can be wrong and youths can be right. Parents also make mistakes. The earlier we all begin to admit that, the better.
