There are few words that can inspire such excitement in a child and such immediate exhaustion in a parent. The child hears “back to school” and thinks about seeing friends, showing off a new school bag and telling everybody about what they did during the holidays. I hear “back to school” and start mentally calculating school fees, transport, uniforms, stationery, lunch boxes, traffic and how many times I will have to say, “Come, let’s do your homework.” before December.
Let me be clear, I love my daughter and I am fully in support of education. I want her to learn, make friends, develop useful skills and eventually become the kind of successful adult who will occasionally make me regret paying for the knowledge that will be used against me in arguments, especially when I can’t respond with, “I carried you for nine months” seeing as I’m… you get the point.
It is everything that comes with getting a child back to school that I resent.
Here, “back to school” is not simply a child returning to a classroom after the holidays. It is a full-scale family operation involving everything I already mentioned, including WhatsApp messages, PTA announcements, early mornings and the inevitable message from the school at 8:47 p.m. telling you that your child needs to bring something to school the following morning that you have never heard of in your life.
So, as the new school term approaches and we all pretend that we are ready for it, here are a few things parents really hate about sending their children back to school.
- School shopping is unnecessarily stressful
I’ll never understand the level of stress that comes with this because why does it feel like you’re furnishing a new home? You can’t choose stationeries and move on, because there has to be a process. You must inspect the covers, compare colours, consider the emotional relationship between the cartoon characters and somehow determine whether a particular notebook is worthy of containing their preschool handwriting.
Then there is the school uniform. Apparently, children grow during the holidays. Who authorised this? You bought a perfectly good uniform three months ago and now the sleeves are somewhere around the elbow and the trousers look like they were borrowed from a younger sibling. So you buy another one, then shoes, socks, sandals and whatever else the school has decided children cannot survive without.
By the time you’re done, you have spent enough money to start wondering whether the school supplies are actually being used to educate the child or whether your child is quietly preparing to open a stationery shop.
- The 5 a.m. version of my child is not my favourite version
One of the best things about the holidays is that nobody has to wake up at an ungodly hour. Your child can sleep until 8 a.m., 9 a.m. or whatever time their body naturally decides to reconnect with civilisation (because you’ve shipped her off to torment her grandparents). You can wake up without immediately calculating how many minutes you have left before you need to leave the house.
Then school resumes and the alarm goes off at 4:30 a.m., and suddenly everybody in the house has become an enemy.
“Wake up.”
Silence.
“It’s time for school.”
More silence.
“Get up, please.”
A muffled sound comes from under the duvet that could mean anything from “I don’t want to wake up.” (Egbami) to “Leave me alone.”
And I understand it. I also don’t want to wake up at 5:30 a.m. The difference is that nobody is threatening to mark me late if I don’t get out of bed. My child, on the other hand, has to be bathed, dressed, fed and deposited in school before the Lagos traffic decides to add another 45 minutes to the journey.
This is where parenting becomes a strange exercise in military logistics. Somebody is brushing their teeth, somebody can’t find their socks, somebody suddenly needs to use the toilet and somebody has remembered that there was supposed to be a signed form in their school bag.
Fantastic.
- Bedtime suddenly becomes your opp
Of course, if children have to wake up early, they also need to go to bed early. This sounds very reasonable until you actually try to put a child to bed.
Children have an extraordinary ability to become tired at every point of the day except the moment you announce that it is bedtime. At 4 p.m., they are lying on the sofa looking like they have been working a 12-hour shift in the reopened Okin Biscuit factory. At 8:30 p.m., you tell them it is time to sleep and suddenly they have never felt more alive.
This is when they remember everything.
They need water. They need to use the toilet. They have homework. They cannot find a pencil. Their stomach hurts. Their leg hurts. They suddenly remember something they wanted to tell you about what happened three days ago. They also need to know why the moon follows the car when you’re driving.
This is why I don’t entirely understand people who say parenting is about patience. Sometimes parenting is about turning off all the lights in the home at 9:43 p.m. (even when you need them) saying, “Please, just close your eyes,” while negotiating with a toddler who has suddenly decided sleep is an infringement on her human rights.
- School has a way of reminding me that I am not as intelligent as I thought I was
There is something humbling about helping your child with homework. During the holidays, I am a very intelligent man. I can discuss politics, football, movies, economics and why Nigerian roads are the way they are. I have opinions on practically everything and, more importantly, nobody is asking me to prove any of them.
Then school resumes.
“Daddy, help me with this.”
You look at the question.
You look at your child.
You look at the question again.
The problem is that the things they teach children now have become complicated. You remember learning some of these things yourself, but that memory is now sitting somewhere deep inside your brain with other useless information, like the lyrics to songs by Tony Tetuila from 2004.
And then there are the moments when your child gives you an answer that looks completely wrong, so you confidently explain why it is wrong, only for her to bring out the textbook and show you that she is actually correct.
That is a humbling experience.
It gets worse as they get older. At some point, your child will ask you something about algebra, chemistry or some historical event that happened before you were born, and you will realise that the person you have been telling to “use your brain” has not used his own brain for this particular purpose since secondary school.
The older they get, the more intelligent they become and the more stupid you suddenly feel.
And before anyone asks, yes, I had to Google whether “stupider” is actually a word.
- Teachers have returned to monitor my parenting
The holidays are wonderful because there is no school watching you. Nobody cares if your child spent the afternoon watching television. Nobody is checking whether she read the recommended book. Nobody is asking whether she completed a worksheet or signed a reading log.
You are free.
Then school resumes and suddenly there are teachers.
Teachers who notice things.
Teachers who send messages.
Teachers who have questions.
Teachers who somehow know that your child did not bring the thing you were absolutely certain you packed in her bag.
And then there is the school WhatsApp group.
I don’t know what we did to deserve school WhatsApp groups, but they have become one of the great tests of parental sanity. At 7:12 p.m., somebody sends a message reminding parents about something that was apparently communicated three weeks ago. By 7:14 p.m., somebody has asked a question. By 7:16 p.m., there are 37 responses, most of which are variations of “Good evening ma” and “Please, what time is the deadline?”
Then comes the dreaded message.
“Dear parents, kindly note that pupils are expected to come to school tomorrow with…”
Tomorrow?
Tomorrow?
Why are we finding this out tonight?
And it is never something you have lying around the house. It is usually cardboard, coloured paper, a particular type of bottle, a Nigerian flag, an old newspaper, a cereal box or some obscure item you last saw in your childhood.
Suddenly, you’re driving around at 8 p.m. looking for a shop that sells A3 cardboard because your child has a project due first thing in the morning.
This is education, apparently.
So yes, I have complaints about going back to school. I don’t like shopping, the early mornings, the bedtime negotiations, the homework, the WhatsApp messages, the school runs, the lunch boxes or the sudden realisation that other parents may have their lives more together than I do.
But the truth is, I don’t actually hate sending my daughter back to school. In fact, there is something lovely about watching her put on her uniform again, pick up her bags and return to the routine of learning and growing.
I just wish somebody would explain why their education requires so much administrative work from me.
I thought I was only sending my child to school, I just didn’t realise I was enrolling too.
