Let me give you a piece of advice: Have nieces and nephews. Plenty of them. Oh, you’re an only child? Okay, we can work this out. Do you have cousins? Oh good. Ahn! You don’t? Your mum was an only child too? Wow. How about your…  Wait, your dad also? Sigh. Okay then. Have a friend that has kids. This should work. Just be familiar with kids, especially before you think of having yours. Be around them. Listen to them chatter, whisper, snore. Listen to the things they aren’t saying. Read their body language. Spank them when necessary (well, as long as their parent doesn’t give you the boot afterwards.) Heck, watch their TV stations. Do monkey-see-monkey-do with them. Dance like there’s nothing wrong with the world. Observe their innocence.

Know all these before you decide to have children. Because if you bring any little one to this world, and you neglect them and allow them fall into the wrong hands because you were too selfish to know what was happening to them; if out of ignorance you allow any of these little ones go astray,  you have God to answer to.

The last few days have hit me hard with heaps of emotion. I read stories of children who had been molested by uncles and step fathers, who had been verbally and physically abused by guardians and even parents. Children who have been pampered and left to rot in the hands of the unscrupulous, who have learnt the wrong things because they didn’t have a parent to tell them what is right. I have heard stories of men and women who have become bitter because of traumatic childhoods, because of parents who never listened. Oh well, do the parents even know what is right? You constantly throw cuss words in your children’s faces, you cheat and lie and steal and ask them to cover up for you, robbing them of their innocence. You leave them to fend for themselves at very tender ages till they begin to do the unthinkable to survive all because you couldn’t handle the responsibility of being a provider for these little ones. You don’t know who their friends or school mothers are; you’re too busy going up the career ladder to care. You let them sit before the TV all day without knowing what they’re watching, and even when you hear them sing certain songs or use certain words, you excuse them as being ‘just kids’.

I know, I know. We live in the world where to not have children is synonymous to being followed by the witches in your village. At weddings, you hear them pray that in nine months there would already be cries of male and female children, as though the couple was expected to conceive on the night of the wedding. This isn’t a bad thing, really.  We’re being fruitful and multiplying as we were created to. Where it becomes a problem is when you bring these little ones to this world and allow them suffer in the hands of the devil and his incarnates because you were too busy living your life to being a parent. It would be a crime if your children cannot talk to you because you have made yourself a terror to them, or a big joke.

It would be better if you didn’t have any children, my friend. It would be better if you were alone in this world than to ruin another man’s life by your poor parenting.

And as for you house-help/uncle/aunty/father/family friend/cousin/whoever-you-are who has made it your life’s mission to ruin that little boy or that little girl and subject them to a life of trauma because you cannot control your libido, it’s a good thing life doesn’t end on earth, because, bros, you will burn. You will burn with sulfur and brimstone in hell, and the fire won’t stop. This isn’t a curse; it’s your reality.

If you do not stop taking advantage of their naivety, I can only say that judgement may evade you on earth, but not for long.

Matt 18:6-7

“But if you give them (these children) a hard time, bullying or taking advantage of their simple trust, you’ll soon wish you hadn’t. You’d be better off dropped in the middle of the lake with a millstone around your neck. (The Message Bible)

Dear parent, listen to the voices of the children you gave birth, listen to their innocent hearts pleading with you to train them right. Don’t leave your children in the dark. Teach them, lead them, be an example to them, point them in the right direction. Pray for them. Feed them. Make them smile. Or don’t have them. Remember, you will account for them. You will.