Nigerian Parent Quotes

I'm late, the kind of late that suggest I have no regard for the emotional health of my Nigerian parents who probably think I've been kidnapped by the enemies of progress.

Americans today enjoy a prosperity like no other people in human history. So if money produces pleasure and pleasure produces happiness, we should be the happiest people ever assembled on this planet. The fact is, we are not. How can this be? This is the question New Republic editor Gregg Easterbrook addresses in his provocative book The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Easterbrook reviews the extraordinary progress made since the time of our great-great grandparents: Average life expectancy has increased dramatically; we are far healthier, without the threat of dreaded diseases like polio and smallpox; the typical American adult has twice the purchasing power his or her parents had in 1960, with the quality of life immeasurably improved.[11] We ought to be very happy, Easterbrook concludes. Yet Americans rank number sixteen in a survey of the happiest people in the world. (Nigerians rank number one.)[12] Americans tell pollsters that the country is on the wrong course, that their parents had it better than they do, that people feel incredibly stressed out. More people are popping Prozac and Zoloft pills; the number of people clinically depressed has increased tenfold in the post–World War II era. Remember the paradoxes we talked about earlier? Well, here is another: Life is better, but we feel worse.

knew when I knocked the deodorant out of my friend’s hand on purpose – I noticed her being precious about it and putting it back in the box (who keeps the box?) after every use – that she was the child of controlling Nigerian parents and that we would become best friends. I knew she was just like me, though her situation was worse, but that there was time for her to be saved, and my role was to be her saviour.

How can all these small-small children just be kissing and having boyfriends and girlfriends in secondary school? Secondary school! This is nonsense, na. What Nigerian child can try this? What Nigerian parent would even allow it?

...a Nigerian couple visiting from Maryland, their two boys sitting next to them on the sofa, both buttoned-up and stiff, caged in the airlessness of their parents' immigrant aspirations.

Sons in Nigerian families are like crowning glories: they continue the family legacy, keep the name going, take up the mantle when the father dies. But in a house with three daughters, my parents found no room for error and sought to mould us into perfect women: impeccable candidates for the perfect wives for the perfect sons-in-law.

We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak, a hard man. In secondary school, a boy and a girl go out, both of them teenagers with meagre pocket money. Yet the boy is expected to pay the bills, always, to prove his masculinity. (And we wonder why boys are more likely to steal money from their parents.) What if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity and money? What if their attitude was not ‘the boy has to pay’, but rather, ‘whoever has more should pay’? Of course, because of their historical advantage, it is mostly men who will have more today. But if we start raising children differently, then in fifty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of proving their masculinity by material means. But by far the worst thing we do to males – by making them feel they have to be hard – is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is. And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend that you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.

Blacks in upscale Shaker Heights are convinced they are victims. They are professionals who moved to the Cleveland suburb because of its good schools, but found that black children had an average grade point average of 1.9 compared to a white average of 3.45. John Ogbu, a Nigerian immigrant who is an expert at UC Berkeley on race differences in school performance, moved to Shaker Heights for nine months and researched the schools. He concluded that most of the problem was that black students were not interested in studying—they considered it “acting white”—and that their parents did not push them. Blacks were outraged. One parent called him “an academic Clarence Thomas,” and the National Urban League said his conclusions were an effort to “blame the victims of racism.” One reporter could not find a single black person in Shaker Heights who had anything good to say about Prof. Ogbu’s conclusions. For blacks, there was only one explanation for black failure: white racism.