We’ve been without electricity for three days now, and the power bank I got specifically for situations like this died on the second day of the outage. I kept hoping we’d get light yesterday, but those hopes were thoroughly shattered when nothing happened.
I eventually had to ask my brother to take the power bank to his workplace to charge it for me, and he brought it back this evening. So, my goal of writing consistently every day without missing a day has already suffered because of this power situation. Anyway, it wasn’t entirely my fault. Living in a country that doesn’t work will do that to you.
I’ve been home all day today, and after spending hours with no electricity and no charged gadgets to work with, I decided to sit outside for a while and get some fresh air.
Then I heard my neighbour yelling at her 15-year-old son. Apparently, this boy has been stealing from her for a while. She’s a single mother, and his father has been a deadbeat from the beginning. He denied the boy from birth, so she has had to take full responsibility for everything concerning him.
From what I gathered, she took out a loan to start a business and asked her son to help out at the shop whenever she wasn’t around. The problem is that whenever he makes sales, he allegedly takes a portion of the money for himself and this has been going on for some time.
I also heard that he has joined a gang and may be using the money to pay his dues. By the time everything escalated today, the whole neighbourhood could hear his mother screaming. She was so angry and heartbroken that she locked him inside the house and beat him.
When she eventually broke open his savings box, she found wads of cash hidden inside. This is a 15-year-old boy whose only job is helping his mother at her shop. She feeds him, clothes him, pays his school fees and provides the things he needs. Yet, according to his mother, he has been stealing from the very business she depends on to take care of both of them.
Honestly, I didn’t feel really orry for him when I heard him crying. Not because I think beating children is the right way to handle these situations, but because I could hear how devastated his mother was. She sounded less like an angry woman and more like a woman who couldn’t understand how the child she had sacrificed so much for had gotten to this point and that part really got to me.
Some teenagers can be incredibly difficult to understand. You can raise them, provide for them, constantly advise them and try to give them opportunities you never had, and they can still make choices that leave you wondering where you went wrong.
His mother is actually a very well-behaved woman. She tries her best to give her son a decent life despite having to do everything alone. So watching all of this happen must be heartbreaking and I don’t know what it is about some teenagers, especially boys, that makes them so willing to throw themselves into things like stealing, gangs and reckless behaviour. Maybe it’s peer pressure or the desire to belong. Perhaps here’s something deeper going on that the adults around them aren’t seeing. Because a 15-year-old having wads of stolen money hidden away and using some of it to fund gang involvement is bigger than just saying he’s ungrateful. There has to be something going on.
Still, I can understand why his mother has reached her breaking point. So, I’m curious, if your child repeatedly stole from you despite being provided for, how would you handle it?
Would you punish them severely, involve someone else, try counseling, or take an entirely different approach?
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