Advice to parents as holidays begin

By Agaba William

There are so many parents who have been crippled after the world pandemic of COVID-19. Most of them lost jobs and opportunities. Life changed for the worst.

  Many parents are suffering. Thank God if you can still afford a meal and school fees for your children. It’s high time Kampala parents who cannot afford the standards in kla to try local government schools in villages otherwise we are heading for a crisis .

Another alternative is to have children enroll for various skills that can earn them a side income to support their education . The problem most Kampala parents make is to stay around town with literally no fall back position . All the money is consumed by rent and daily basic needs (Bakola mere Yalelo) .        These are parents who cannot even afford a descent medical care even for a simple sickness like malaria.

And to the parents who can still afford to pay school fees in these Kampala schools , it’s a matter of time if things don’t change . After  Covid School heads and teachers realized that to survive you must be smart so there is always something on plan to milk money from parents.

We need to train our children various skills and multitasking  for them to be job creators not job seekers .
If the holiday is for 30 days , let the kid work on something that will earn him or her some money .If you have a business, don’t leave children at home in holidays ,get them along and they see how things are done . 

Teach them and regulate their use and exposure to social media platforms.Internet is good but very bad if not regulated to the young ones. 

Also as a teacher my advice is that we should stop sending children for holiday studies, this is simply creating children who cannot think critically because the mind is always focused towards one academic dimension . Let kids study something else outside the school syllabus and in this way they will think critically at life outside school.

Remember in the three terms of a school calendar ( more than 260 days  )in a year children are exposed to some irrelevant content like wheat growing in Canada , Tennessean valley authority , naming parts of a cockroach, naming parts of a flower etc , so let them relax their minds during the holidays as they learn new and productive skills of life.

The writer is a physics/mathematics teacher and a motivational speaker.