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Are you scripting or training your children to be emotionally stable and successful abroad? That was the million-dollar question Mr Praise Fowowe, an internationally acclaimed Family Systems Coach, asked parents at a recent parenting webinar organised by SparkXplorer, an afterschool learning platform, for Spark Scholars’ parents.
If you aspire to japa one day or perhaps you are unmarried now but have plans to give your children a Global North citizenship by birthing them in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, France, etc. when you eventually starts to raise a family, or you plan to send your children abroad for quality education then you may want to read this article. We can even flip the question. Are you scripting or training your children to be emotionally stable and successful here in Nigeria?
Why is that important?
The world has become global and success translates to leadership, respect, and legacy. Societies and regions today are jostling to lead the world. Nigeria and Africa cannot afford to lag behind in the race, fighting for crumbs, hence the need to position their next generation for success.
The rat race and absentee parenting
Emotion and success are intertwined and Fowowe’s question has become critical because many children today are emotionally damaged, particularly in the Western world, where there is a liberal attitude to marriage, family, and parenting. Many African immigrant homes abroad are caught up in the rat race of survival, with both parents in many such homes running multiple jobs like a DJ on a Serato Pioneer console, and very little time for actual parenting. Such slack parenting is also on the increase in Nigeria. Thus, there is an alarming increase in emotionally challenged youth who endure absentee parents and turn to whomever or wherever they can access to find answers to life’s questions.
Disturbing youth suicide rate due to emotional turmoil
Data has shown that mental health issues are a mounting concern in teenagers and young adults. A 2023 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that suicide is the second leading cause of death among 10 to 34-year-olds in the US. Of this number, 19.6% are black or African American. A Yale School of Medicine publication last year revealed that “suicide is rising dramatically in preteens as young as 8 years old as well.” And the publication revealed that the “trend is even more alarming regarding Black children and teens,”… where the “suicide rate among Black youth ages 10-17 increased by 144% between 2007 and 2020.”
It is a similar picture across the world. For instance, in the UK, data gleaned from the Office of National Statistics showed that “suicide rates among young people aged 15-19 in England rose by 35 per cent from 2020 to 2021.” According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), “Suicide is the leading cause of death among Australians aged 15–24 years.” AIHW also revealed that the intentional self-harm hospitalisation figure is on the increase in that country. The UK and Australian data include children of immigrants. Data by the World Health Organisation showed that “suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15 to 29-year-olds.” Remember 19-year-old Faith Opesusi (see my article in Businessday of 25 May 2025), who committed suicide two months ago because she believed she failed the JAMB examination. That is typical of emotional imbalance.
So, really, raising emotionally stable children is today a top priority for any parent. Emotional imbalance often leads to failure or unfulfilled potential, hence the need to script or train children to master their emotions and unleash their potential.
Life is scripted otherwise confusion will reign
Nothing in life happens by chance. Every aspect of life, failure or success, is scripted by individuals, societies, or a divine power. Our creator put systems, structures, and principles in place to ensure orderliness. Malcolm X famously said, “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” Isaac Newton’s Law of Inertia says an object at rest remains so until an external force moves it. What Newton and Malcolm X have shown is that one has to be deliberate to gain a desired outcome. As a parent, if you want your child to be great, you have to plant and nurture the greatness in the child. You cannot will it to happen.
Fowowe encouraged African parents in diaspora to ensure they nudge their children to the greatness they deserve through the building of an effective family system. He mentioned a book he read where it was projected that by 2060, the entire American workforce will be built on immigrants, but that White Americans will still hold the political power, deciding who does or gets what. According to the family coach, if parenting is intentional enough, African immigrant parents can script/position their children to be among the law givers rather than being the law takers in that future time. Who says plenty more Obamas, Kamala Harris, Kemi Badenoch, or Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala cannot be produced? Or in business, they can train their children to lead the world in business and enterprise, much like Elon Musk.
An identity crisis
The family coach said the greatest crisis faced today by African immigrant children, particularly in the US, that may inhibit scripting is an identity crisis. Those children do not know who they are; they are torn between two cultures: the African culture of their parents, which they hardly know nor understand, yet are expected by the parents to respect, and the western culture they grew up to know, which the African parents consider too permissive and try to resist in their children.
The need to course correct by immigrant parents
The first is to reassess the rules of building an effective family system. Fowowe said the old African rule relies on emotions, a spur-of-the-moment thing. In Africa, parents are the be-all, know-all beings who brook no dissent. They would often give instructions to the children without adequate backgrounding, such as the reason for the instruction and the intended outcome, and expect the children to comply. The African child in the Western world is exposed to different realities and situations at a young age and has access to different kinds of information at the touch of a button. So, it is no longer enough to simply shove instructions at them and expect compliance or attempt to shout them down. They want to know the why and the outcome. That helps them gain a better understanding, leading to internalisation and easy compliance.
Thus, a Nigerian parent in the US, for instance, must adopt the intentional scripting powered by systems and intelligence to build a collaborative family system and raise emotionally stable and successful children. It is this system and the environment the parents have created in the home that will birth the children’s overall stability and attainment in life.
Adoption of the 4 battle lines
Identity
The second action is to draw up four critical battle lines. Fowowe listed these lines as Identity, History, Village, and Mission. The children must be thoroughly schooled in their heritage and culture as Africans. They must be made aware of the African way of life, the values, including integrity, empathy, hard work, communality, respect, diligence, filial attachment and love, critical thinking, peaceful co-existence, and so on. As much as possible, the African immigrant parents must expose their children to their mother tongue, cuisine, fashion, and mores. This gives the children a grounding, a defined identity that they can wear with pride.
History
History is to educate the children on Africa’s proud heritage, like Africa having the oldest continuously operating degree-granting university in the world, in Morocco, the University of al-Qarawiyyin, which was established in 859AD. That Africa pioneered basic arithmetic about 25,000 years ago, or that ancient Benin City built a great wall of circa 10,000 miles that is comparable to China’s Great Wall, or that Ile-Ife in present-day Osun State had paved roads in 1000 AD. If we fail to tell these stories of greatness and momentous accomplishments to our children then we risk others rewriting our stories and supplanting them to fit their agenda – that is already happening, anyway. We risk being defined by the bad behaviour of a few Africans and that is what our children will judge us by.
Village
Village speaks to the communality of the African society, where we are our brothers’ – and sisters’ – keepers, where we take pride in building each other up rather than seeking to tear down, where we look out for each other’s wellbeing. Our children need to know this and also see it through regular social engagements and interactions among Africans wherever we are in diaspora.
Mission
Mission addresses the question of why we choose to live outside of Africa and what success will look like for Africans in foreign lands. Is it just to escape the poverty on the continent? Success should go beyond living comfortable lives with our families. It should embody an impact on the homeland, much the same way as diaspora Jews, Chinese, and Indians helped to build their nations. It should include the positioning of Africa as a leader in world affairs. Those are the conversations that will excite the current generation and give them a clearer sense of purpose.
As Fowowe suggested, Nigerian and African parents in diaspora must undertake a personal heritage audit to know their heritage and teach it to their children, create a family system roadmap matrix, as well as research, embrace, and replicate a family system template that works.
African immigrants must reassess their priorities, ditch outdated family systems, and build a new one that is optimised for raising emotionally stable children as a pivot to attaining greatness, and in the process highlight Africa’s greatness and position the continent to lead the world.
