Beyond the nuclear option

Its time for some balance and to stress some Nigerian positives and Western negatives. For the latter, need one look further than the UK, where Tony Bliar's neo-labour project becomes enmired in sleaze, via the cash-for-peerages row? The man has to go and the Tories need to try harder to kick the Labour party out of its slumberous complacency. One also hopes this marks the death-knell for ppp in the Education sector (at least). We don't want creationism-as-an-alternative-to-evolution taught in science classes, thanks very much Mr Vardy.. I for one will crack open the bubbly when the Blair project (Thatcherism by proxy) is finally laid to rest.

Meanwhile, on to something I deeply admire about Nigeria:

I've always had a rose-tinted view of extended families. I grew up in a loving nuclear family, with wonderful parents and a big-hearted sister. Some of favourite memories however are when our segment of the family joined forces with other branches.

We used to go to Cornwall every year with a bunch of Aunts, Uncles and cousins, to the same house near Padstow ("Miss Yelland's Bungalow"). I have beautiful warmglow memories of witty banter, food, drink, people gathered round the TV for FA cup finals and cascades of laughter.

In this respect, I think one of the really positive models the West can learn from Nigeria is having a more pragmatic approach to child-rearing, based around the Nigerian/African extended-family model. In a nuclear context, when parents break up, or if a single-parent situation arises in other ways, it is generally viewed as a very difficult and often traumatising event for the child. In Nigeria, if a difficult situation arises with the parents or parent, the child can simply be farmed out to a more accommodating situation.

Instead of ego-trauma as in the West, the fluidity of parenting opportunities in the extended family situation means the child does not experience the shift in a negative fashion. I'm sure many Nigerians can find the extended family testing at times, but there is I think something very much more practical and risk-mitigating about this approach. There was something similar amongst the working class in Britain years ago, but it has more or less died out.

More, there seems to me to be a much healthier approach to parenting and discipline in the Nigerian context than in the UK. The parent-as-friend model has gone way too far in the UK. One only has to watch Supernanny (yes my life has been reduced to watching such things) on BBC - a programme featuring episode after episode of dreadful children being brought to heel by a practical and wise nanny figure - to see how bad things have got. The lack of boundaries in many British families turn the children in little Hitlers. In the Nigerian scenario, those boundaries remain firmly in place and techniques such as supernanny's naughty corner are second nature.

All this reminds me in part of Plato's Republic. Plato's view 2500 years ago was that in the perfect State, children would be brought up by parent-experts - people trained in child-rearing techniques. Biological parents would give up their children to these parent-experts at birth. The children would therefore not know who their biological parents were. Beyond that, Plato trails off into a curious form of meritocracy - whereby people with 'gold' in their soul become warrior-kings, those with 'silver' in their soul get cushy administrative jobs, and those with 'bronze' in their soul dig the ditches. Not sure about the metallurgic metaphor or the meritocracy it tries to support, but the suggestion of universal bastardry is an interesting one. Perhaps the Nigerian extended family is the most practical realisation of this idea. In any event, programmes such as supernanny reveal the worst that can go wrong in a Western nuclear context.