In this report, BIODUN BUSARI highlights the challenges Nigerian parents face in raising children in the diaspora, where foreign values often clash with African principles. Many who relocate for better opportunities struggle to instil Nigerian discipline, respect, and family structure in their children, while balancing two cultures. In some cases, their disciplinary measures, intended to safeguard their children, can put them at odds with the law

In the dead of night, beneath a sky streaked with flying missiles and the echo of hushed words amid crumbling buildings, while troops strategised to seize territories, ground units patrolled war-torn streets, and wounded soldiers tended to their pain, Dr Olabisi Johnson, a four-month pregnant woman, fled across European borders, her heart pounding with every step, praying she would survive the horrors of the Russian invasion of Ukraine to one day cradle her unborn child.

She and her four friends, in despair, would wish they had not moved to Ukraine for their academics.

The war had turned their dreams and smiles into curses and hisses laden with gloom, as thoughts of her family, husband, children, and mother in the United Kingdom flashed before her.

“I started my studies in Belarus, and when it became difficult to continue, I moved to Ukraine. But everything fell apart again when the war began,” Johnson recalled, marking the beginning of her challenging journey as a parent in the diaspora.

The dream of studying abroad had taken her out of Nigeria in 2011. While most of her family chose the UK, she deliberately set her sights on Eastern Europe, seeking opportunities far from home.

She usually visited her husband in the UK. But when Russian troops turned Ukraine into a battle-scarred country in 2022, reuniting with her husband became her one goal, as border patrols threatened that dream.

Visa above multilingualism

After days in the jungle, French border patrols, armed to the teeth, refused to compromise procedures or lower standards despite Johnson’s predicament.

Her protruding tummy should have been leverage to give her safe passage, but it only drew pity from the soldiers after knowing they were escapees from the war-torn nation.

“It’s so difficult for me,” she said, casting her mind back to her ordeal. “Initially, I was happy when we were told that we had reached the French border. We even had Ukrainian residents there.”

However, her happiness was cut short when the French troops said they could not enter without Schengen visas.

“I can’t forget that experience because I almost died in that war in Ukraine. I was pregnant, for God’s sake! We were about five at the border. I showed them my residence in the UK, but they said we couldn’t go without a Schengen visa,” she recounted.

“And I cannot speak French. I can speak Russian very well. I also speak Belarusian fluently. I also speak Ukrainian and Polish. Somehow, French stood between me and crossing over to see my husband.”

The French government was aware of her predicament and ordered that she and her friends be lodged in a nearby hotel. The patrols planned to return them to Ukraine when the war had ceased. However, she went through the rigours of immigration before eventually arriving at her destination.

Pathetic mothering experience

After spending days at the French border, Johnson told Sunday PUNCH that the reunion with her husband in the UK came with a disturbing parenting responsibility.

She gave birth in August 2022; however, the reality of her new environment required financial strength to live with her husband, which they could not afford.

Before giving birth, Johnson, an orthopaedic surgeon, relived the pain of squatting with her mother, realising that it became easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to live with her husband.

“I was living with my mum when I got to the UK. I decided to stay with her because it became hard for me to live with my husband. We planned to live together as a couple, but his landlady said we had to pay more rent. Imagine the landlady was a Nigerian and had no pity on me,” Johnson narrated.

“The rent was £900 for a box room. A container is even bigger. She said we should add money to the house. She asked for an extra £150 for the rent. I told my husband that the money was too much, that I would stay with my mum.”

When Johnson thought her mother would be her succour during her postpartum days, the old woman, however, left the house the very day she gave birth, kickstarting her travails of nursing a child in the diaspora.

“My mother got a new job,” said the mother of three. “She needed to stay close to her new job. Unfortunately, I had to move out of the accommodation. So I rented a room in a hotel for three months. Then, I went to look for another house.”

Landlords’ council tax burdens

Clarifying why many landlords become hostile toward tenants in their properties, Johnson noted that house owners in England, Wales, and Scotland face financial burdens of paying council tax.

The GOV.UK website describes the council tax as a system of local taxation collected by local authorities on domestic property.

It further states, “This is a tax on domestic property collected by the local authority to pay for local services such as schools, rubbish collection, roads, and street lighting.”

Describing the toll of the council tax on the landlords, who, in turn, transfer their burdens to tenants, Johnson says, “If you have three children and you don’t tell your landlord, they will send you packing when they get to know. They don’t usually accept a father, mother, and three or four children in their houses.”

She explained her ordeal during her early days as a nursing mother in the UK.

“The landlord would tell you that your children would spoil their property or mess up the wall. Most of them will not like to accommodate families because of the council tax. The government puts more council tax based on the number of families in the house. So that’s why they don’t want to pay more council tax.”

Additionally, she stated that the British government is concerned about the welfare of children and will not condone any act that jeopardises their welfare or threatens their health.

This, she explained, was why landlords and landladies tread cautiously in cases which involved underage tenants.

“If I owe my landlord, he can throw me out. But if I’m owing and he throws me out with my children, and I report to the council, he will be scared. I have the right to stay there and raise money until I find somewhere to move to. If I don’t have a child, it’s easy for the landlord to chase me away. If I have a child, the landlord doesn’t have the right to evict me,” Johnson added.

Better life costs extra

When Gisela Esapa left Nigeria for the UK three years ago, she never knew that her dream of giving her children a better life would come at an extra cost, not a financial one alone.

She soon learned that giving her children the best transcends financial burdens; emotional, psychological, and physical resources must also be provided.

“I left Nigeria to create better opportunities for my kids, especially my 14-year-old son with learning disabilities,” she sighed. “I knew relocation was not easy, especially to a far-developed world, but I had to take the step. I knew the lifestyle was completely different, but I had to challenge myself so that my children could learn to integrate better, since the reason for leaving Nigeria was mainly for them.”

As a support worker in Dunstable County, Esapa and her husband worked shifts to raise four children, and nothing must go wrong in securing their lives, even if they were not physically present.

Her experience with her 14-year-old boy, Josh, tested her maternal role in an environment foreign to African-style parenting.

Boy’s burden, mother’s responsibility

“I have a son with a little learning disability. He is my second son. If you don’t interact with him, you won’t notice. If you ask him basic questions, he can answer. But he can’t express himself for long. He is not comfortable with long conversations,” Esapa explained.

She had thought that the school her son was enrolled in would be a solace for him and a relief for her struggles. It was, however, the opposite the day she failed to be there for him for just a few minutes.

“We got a school for him. But it became an issue for them when they noticed a disability in him. It wasn’t a physical disability. He is just a little challenged in terms of learning. They wanted us to be with him every time, but that is not possible. I have to work to earn a living,” she cried.

“There was trouble on a fateful day. My friend had helped me drop him off at school. She would help me with her children because they attend the same school. He was dropped off at the reception, and his teacher was supposed to pick him up. But they insisted someone had to stay with him until the teacher came.”

“My boy is the type who would not sit in one place. He likes looking at cars and people passing. He was in the reception area, looking out through the glass door and smiling. These things are familiar to little children, especially in a new environment. He would just look out, smiling and watching people. This became a burden when the school authorities complained.”

Esapa, working in a British environment, gradually became embroiled in offering special attention to her 14-year-old boy. The attention was not merely care, but a demand from school staff who magnified issues that overwhelmed her.

“There was a day his elder brother left him at school. He forgot to pick him up,” she recounted. “On that day, they closed earlier at 12 noon. By 12:10 p.m., Josh was still wandering in the school. In those 10 minutes, they had called my husband several times. He was busy at work. They had called me too. Unfortunately, I had put my phone on silent because I was sleeping. I had a migraine.”

“They had already bombarded him with questions. They asked him where I was. They asked if I had abandoned him. When I eventually checked my phone, I saw several missed calls from my husband. I didn’t know how I raced to the school.

“When I got there, I couldn’t even recall all the English they unleashed on me. They recommended that I see a social worker, then a clinical officer, and a general practitioner. Everyone was collecting reports, all because a child with a learning disability stayed an extra 10 minutes on the school premises,” she said.

In her struggle to fend for her children and survive shifts, Esapa summoned the courage to confront the authorities at Josh’s school after a friend’s advice.

“A friend told me, ‘You have to speak with confidence,’” Esapa explained. “That was when I faced them at his school. I made a detailed report about his condition. They invited me, and I defended my points. I let them know my child was fine. It was then that they respected my opinions.”

Despite all the challenges, Esapa believes British principles of nurturing children are not entirely bad, though she condemned the overindulgence.

“I won’t say I prefer theirs completely over ours. And I will not say I prefer ours completely over theirs,” she smiled.

“There are things to learn from their side, and things to retain from our culture. In the UK, parents first listen to children before reacting. Back home in Nigeria, we react first before listening. The downside is that they overindulge.”

‘Don’t beat, don’t talk’

A business analyst, Babatunde Adegbindin, pointed out that the burdens of parenting are enormous, and Nigerian parents in the diaspora would need to devise means to train their children properly.

He maintained that adopting unique styles of passing information to children through facial expressions in the British terrain is imperative.

Adegbindin explained that his children may adopt the unconventional lifestyle of disrespecting not only their parents but all adults, while avoiding clashes with British laws that prohibit smacking and harsh words.

“If you have made up your mind to live in a country with so many laws as you find here, you must also be prepared to abide by the rules, so that you don’t fall into trouble,” he said.

“When you are in this kind of country, there are so many restrictions. You can’t beat the children. Even when you talk to them, you can’t talk too much or use harsh words that can affect their mental health or self-esteem.”

Individualistic environment

Adegbindin explained that the African setting, where parents, teachers, and older family members have the moral responsibility to discipline younger ones, is not permissible in the UK. Rather, an individualistic environment is what is obtained in most European and American cultures. This gives children the opportunity to misbehave without restrictions.

He noted, “Africans are used to communal living. But in this country, if you don’t have family, God help you. People are alone. People are too individualistic. Everybody just minds their own business.”

“I remember a day I went to watch one of my kids playing football for a team. One of the white kids on the opponent’s team was being racist. He used racist slurs at my boy. He complained to the coach, but it seemed nobody was listening, so I approached the referee. Then another boy from the team charged at me. If not for self-control, I would have slapped him. I just asked him to ‘shut up and get out of my sight.’”

“Even the parents of the boy were on his side. Obviously, he didn’t want me to correct his child. It was the referee who saved the day.”

Adegbindin shared that in his quest to ensure kids are properly raised, he created a theatrical group to teach morals, especially to Nigerian children. He said raising children in the Western world requires confidence and using all resources to bring out the best in them.

“Many immoral things are on the internet. So I formed a Halal group, which is an Arabic name for ethical or permissible. The idea is to act out plays from the scriptures. We put that on stage to teach our children. There are many stories in the Quran and the Bible to teach families how to have a fertile upbringing,” he added.

Halloween celebration

An economist residing in Ottawa, Canada, Oluwatobi Ogundele, says parenting in Canada involves constantly explaining events to her children to give them a sense of judgment. The mother of three said the environment raises curiosity in children, and as an African woman, she assumes the responsibility of communicating.

“Every October, when there is a Halloween celebration, my children always ask about it. They’re interested, but I explain to them that it’s not something we celebrate in Nigeria. Having to explain to my kids whenever we drive down the road is a challenge in itself.

“When you see people decorating their homes with graveyards, witches, zombies, and ghosts. I’ve had to explain to them that it is a celebration of the dead and darkness. I let them know it clashes with our morals and faith as Nigerians,” Ogundele said.

Recounting the joy of how school teachers contribute to the discipline of children in Nigeria, Ogundele said it is the opposite in Canada, where teachers report parents to authorities if any slight bodily punishment is noticed.

“Here in Canada, the teachers will be the ones who report you if they suspect that you are doing anything contrary to what the Canadian law prescribes. It’s a daily struggle to navigate the way the country is structured and those societal norms,” she added.

Clash of values

Applauding American norms that prohibit corporal punishment, a United States-based senior systems engineer, Adetola Ademola, expressed his opposition to a practice that he said leaves bodily marks on children,

“Sometimes, back home in Africa, some of those things tend to become abuse in the name of correcting a child. The US is not saying ‘Don’t correct your child.’ They are only saying, ‘Don’t abuse your child,’ and that is the difference.

“You can correct your child. What they don’t want is abuse. So, if you are a parent who still believes in spanking, you can do it if it does not leave a mark on the child’s body,” Ademola stated.

However, Ademola maintained that gentle parenting does not necessarily translate into good parenting, as many African parents erroneously believe.

“There are still parents who shout, because most of our African children are not gentle children. Naturally, no matter the room or space we occupy, we African parents are boisterous, and it reflects in training our children. Consequently, they take after us.

“So I feel that mindset has helped me a lot to caution myself when I want to raise my voice at my kids, because I realised that gentle parenting requires gentle children. And in most cases, our children are not gentle. So it is harder to be a gentle parent with our kids, because they model what they see us do,” she added.

‘Greeting is tasking’

Ademola explained that something as simple as a greeting is a significant lesson she consistently teaches her children, one that prevents them from adopting Western norms.

“I think the one I have experienced is greeting. When I first got to the US, I realised that children were just greeted by saying ‘hello’ and ‘hi.’ I kept teaching my children to kneel and say ‘good morning’ instead of ‘hello’. I found it insulting for a child to say ‘hi’ to an elderly person,” she said.

“And my kids challenged me: ‘Why do we have to kneel to greet?’ They defended themselves, and it took me a lot of time and energy to explain why they had to do it, that it is our way as Nigerians, and they must not lose their identity.

“After they presented their reasons why it was difficult and inconvenient to kneel every time they saw an adult, I reached a compromise with them: not every time, but they should greet the elderly with respect. I insisted they greet with ‘good morning’, ‘good afternoon’, or ‘good evening’.”

Discipline in love

Speaking with Sunday PUNCH, a child advocacy expert in Lagos, Florence Ubajekwe, appealed to diaspora-based Nigerian parents to communicate with their children in love.

Defending children’s rights, she maintained that Nigerian children should respect African values introduced by their Nigerian parents, but not in a way that jeopardises their psychology or emotions.

“Nigerian kids should adapt to the law and still remember that they are Nigerians and should respect our elders. We are trained to obey our elders. Your elders could be your parents, relatives, senior citizens, and siblings.

“Parents should know that communication is key. Whatever you are doing with your children, you should know the right time, the right atmosphere, and the right environment to pass information,” Ubajekwe said.

“I think parents should take their children as their best friends. If your best friend misbehaves, you should call the person and find the right time to talk. When you discipline them, let it be mild. You can still discipline a child, but discipline the child with love,” she added.

Removal of children

A Nigerian-American judge at Kings County Family Court in Brooklyn, New York, Abayomi Ajaiyeoba, provided an insight into the law regarding the removal of children from their parents in the US.

He explained that the American law does not prevent parents from disciplining their wards, but only frowns at extreme punishment that brings physical and emotional pain.

“In the US, parents have the right to discipline their children, but not in a way that causes harm or injury,” Ajaiyeoba said. “If there is corporal punishment that impedes children’s welfare, that is where parents would have challenges.”

“In a situation where a school or hospital reports that a child is subjected to injury during discipline, then the court will rule if such a child should be removed from their parents. The goal is to keep children safe, support the family, and preserve the parent-child relationship.”

“However, removing children from their parents is the last resort because child protection services, such as social welfare agencies, are concerned about the safety of children in America.”

The judge said no Nigerian parent in the US has a legal or moral right to use an object to punish their children.

“The law prohibits severe beating, bruises on a child’s body, and the use of objects such as belts, wires, and sticks. The standard in the US is that Nigerian parents must not cause physical injury, emotional harm, sexual abuse, neglect, or leave children alone for a long period. Teachers and medical workers must call child welfare services to report,” she added.

No hiding of character flaws

In his submission, the pastor of Dominion City, Lincoln, UK, Chinedu Agudiegwu, asserted that parenting is not difficult in the UK or anywhere in the world if parents understand the law and create time to bond with their children.

“The secret here is to ensure that you understand British laws and obey them. Most parents don’t pay attention to this fact because they forget that every country has its own laws,” Agudiegwu said.

“I want to categorically say that any hidden character flaws you have will be exposed once you start living here. Therefore, it is expedient for parents to understand, obey, and respect the laws governing the land.”

He supported his submission with the Biblical quote, “Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”