African parents are too religious and really don't do much when it comes to educating a child on adulthood and certain changes they will experience with their body as time goes on.
I was having a conversation with some boys and one of them told us about how he had to learn about having pubic hairs and handling it all by himself. He had told us about the one time he had mentioned to his dad that hairs were beginning to grow in places that they weren't growing in before, and his dad had immediately shut him up, almost as if he had said a bad word or something.
And due to the fear of getting whooped by him, he had shut up and never mentioned it to him or anyone else ever since. He had to buy his first shaving stick by himself, and after several cuts on himself, he eventually got it right. All of this simply because an African dad had refused to sit his boy down and explain these changes that he was now experiencing.
After he was done with his story, it reminded me about high school and how a girl in my class had experienced the same thing too. Some other girl had noticed some stain on her skirt, and they had quickly taken her to the toilet to wash her up. And I remember being so confused as I couldn't understand why most of the girls in class were going in and out.
But I wasn't as confused as the young girl who was experiencing her first menstrual flow. It was the other girls in class who had to sit her down and explain the changes she now was experiencing with her body. This is something her mom should have spoken to her about months ago, or even a year before she got to that age.
But for some reason, some parents have this mentality that teaching a child about something that they're not old enough to know is corrupting that child, when in reality it's not. Education is important, regardless of if you think it's good or bad. This is why some kids end up getting molested and won't say anything to anyone because they don't even know that something wrong has been done to them.
Hopefully this new generation of parents gets to do better and begin on time (or at least when their kids get to certain ages) to educate them on topics like this.
