Dr Kevin’s Parenting Manual

Introduction: As everyone knows, it is very important to rear a child according to the norms and practices of the parents’ own culture. Otherwise, the child becomes confused and may act in a way that causes embarrassment and social ostracism, like doing an Indian dance to a Cro Cro song. Unfortunately, there is no local material written about parenting so, inasmuch as I have no kids but do own a Cross fountain pen, I have decided to fill this gap by writing a short manual on the topic. This will help all Trini parents to bring up their children in a culturally appropriate fashion, without having to imitate foreigners by reading a book.

Babies’ Baby: You should make your first child in your late teens or early 20s. This is because, if you have them later, your grandmother may be too old to take care of them and you will not be able to lime as you wish. Mind you, this is not an insurmountable obstacle: a little bit of rum in the formula and you can rest assured that the child will sleep through the night when you go Pier One. (However, you still should not leave matches or lighted candles within easy reach.) If you are going to calypso tent or Divali Nagar, add puncheon to the rum-and-milk so you can carry the infant with you confident that it will not wake up and spoil your enjoyment of the show.

Parenting Courses: The Education Ministry has recently decided to help young people become parents by implementing an abstinence-only policy in schools. Some weeks ago, the Ministry brought down some American religious propagandists posing as policy experts who claimed that abstinence-only progammes were more effective than programmes that recommended abstinence, fidelity and condoms. In point of fact, every study shows the opposite to be the case, so you can rest assured that, if the new policy has any effect at all, it will raise the rates of teenage pregnancies and HIV-infections. But you need not worry too much about the latter possibility, since Trinidad has Catholic fundamentalist Dr Courtenay Bartholomew heading clinical vaccine trials in case his AIDS-prevention advice — abstinence, not watching porn, and not educating people about condom use — fails miserably.

Attitude Advice: The right attitude for parenting can best be learned by listening to the society’s exemplars since, being exemplars, they embody culturally correct values. Thus, by paying close attention to people like Pastor Clive Dottin, Canon Clive Griffith, Maha Sabha head Sat Maharaj, and trade unionist Raffique Shah, wanna-be parents will learn the importance of beating their children in order to ensure they grow up to be disciplined adults who, like all the persons listed above, do not break the law or behave in an unethical fashion or dance the Funky Chicken.

Pecuniary Potty Training: This is the first and most important task that parents will have to accomplish. Shania King, who was a year-and-a-half old, is now dead because she could not pee on command. Some people may think her killer went too far. But every enlightened parent understands the necessity of bladder control, especially for females. Had she not been killed, Shania might well have grown up to be the kind of woman who pulls down her panties in Carnival fetes and urinates on the ground. In Singapore, such acts carry a hefty fine, jail term, and more whipping: and Singaporeis one of the richest nations in the world. It might be argued, then, that public peeing harms the economy, and it may well be that Shania’s murderer has helped improve Trinidad’s fiscal outlook by beating her to death.

Beating Benefits: At the same time, we don’t want to be killing children willy-nilly. After all, even those people who recommend beating children say it must stop short of permanent physical damage and mustn’t be done in anger. So, if there happen to be some parents who don’t know their own strength or who can’t control their rage, we must understand that the lives of a few infants must be sacrificed if our society is to achieve the overall discipline that will be instilled in young people by beating them till they bawl.

Dictating Discipline: We might even ask if 18-year-old Kevin Cato would have gotten killed if he had been wining in a more disciplined manner. Maybe then he wouldn’t have bounced the policeman who shot him. And, since it was a policeman who did the shooting, we can assume that he was highly-disciplined: indeed, Raffique Shah, who believes that only a dictatorship can make this country progressive, should have been glad to see such rapid police measures being carried out in a Carnival fete. After all, it was Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, who condemned Trinidadians for their Carnival mentality; and Singapore is one of the most advanced countries in the world and indeed a virtual dictatorship. And Prime Minister Patrick Manning has been doing his best to ensure that he gets control of the police force, the alternative police force, and militant Muslims.

Spirit Lash: Parents must not only take care of their children’s physical self, but their spiritual self as well. Luckily, we have leaders like Canon Griffith, who recommends exorcisms in schools in order to reduce violence. This fits exactly into the model of local parenting which we want to encourage: ensuring that children grow up as superstitious and as ignorant as possible, and never learn about “a Satanic theory,” to quote Pastor Dottin, such as evolution. This is because, in the modern world, understanding science is crucial to understanding reality: but, as we all know, a true Trini always avoids facing reality.

State Support: Although it is now banned, parents should support teachers who use corporal punishment in schools. After all, there is no better method for ensuring that your child grows to dislike learning and so fits into Trinidadian culture like yam, or rather, KFC leg-and-thigh in Trini mouth. And, if beating them blacker fails to produce well-behaved youths, parents should clamour for the method recommended by another highly successful Trinidadian: Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj who, when he was Attorney General, wanted the hanging age reduced so he could execute minors. In this way, all the child-killing won’t be left up to parents alone, and in no time at all the country will have young people who are either extremely disciplined or extremely dead.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
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