Stop repeating instructions to children. You are killing their productivity

On Instruction & Upbringing

If He Meant It, He Will Repeat

The habit of repetition dulls a child’s response to instruction — and quietly prepares them for collision with the working world, and with everyone who later chooses to trust them.

Dr. rer. nat. habil. Dr. Seronei Chelulei Cheison

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In the January of my first year at Mars, two technicians and I sat down and laid out twelve months of work — the pilot trials, the timelines, the dependencies, the lot. I was new to the company and newer still to the grammar of German industry, and I had braced myself for the labour I had always assumed was the connective tissue of getting anything done: the follow-up emails, the corridor reminders, the gentle “where are we on this?” that I had been raised to believe held a plan together. It never came. The trials ran to the minute. When something threatened to slip, it was flagged before I had thought to ask. By summer I caught myself doing something faintly absurd — feeling surprised that the plan was simply working.

That surprise was the most revealing thing in the whole affair, and it was a fact about me, not about them. The plan held not because I policed it but because, somewhere in their formation, an instruction had become a thing that binds the person who receives it. They had not complied with the January plan. They had committed to it. And once a person commits, the plan acquires its own engine; it no longer needs a driver leaning on the horn.

They had not complied with the January plan. They had committed to it.

I had come from a different grammar of instruction altogether — one in which a thing said once is a thing said tentatively, and the real message is understood to arrive with the second telling, or the third. We carry a quiet creed for it, and I have repeated it to people more than once: if he meant it, he will repeat. We wait for the chorus before we move. And I have come to believe that this creed is not a workplace habit at all. It is learned at the knee, in the years when a child first discovers what an instruction is actually worth.

· · ·

Watch an ordinary household in the hour before school. A mother gives an instruction. The child does not stir. She gives it again, louder. She gives it a third time, now with a threat attached, and only then does the child move. The psychologist Gerald Patterson gave this small daily drama its name — the coercive cycle — and showed how faithfully it teaches. Each turn of the loop delivers one precise lesson: the first instruction is noise; the signal is the escalation. The child is not being defiant. The child is being rational. He has correctly learned the exchange rate of his own home.

The behavioural researchers Forehand and McMahon drew the line even more sharply. A clear, specific instruction delivered once — they called it an alpha command — is obeyed at high rates. A vague, chained, repeated, nagged instruction — the beta command — trains a kind of selective deafness. The tragedy is that the loving parent, the patient one who would never dream of being harsh, is often the most prolific manufacturer of beta commands. Patience curdles into repetition, and repetition, said often enough, becomes instruction in how to ignore.

Here I must be careful, because the cure is the easiest thing in the world to get wrong, and I have no interest in arming anyone with a club. The answer is emphatically not to punish a child into vigilance. The evidence — Alan Kazdin’s work above all — is blunt that warmly reinforcing the behaviour you want outperforms punishing the behaviour you do not, and that consistency matters far more than severity. There is a prior question, too, that any honest parent must ask before reaching for consequence: can the child do this, or merely will he not? A child who cannot hold a single instruction in mind may be carrying an attention difference, not insolence, and a three-year-old’s unfinished brain is not built for the same expectation as a ten-year-old’s. Ross Greene put it cleanly: children do well if they can.

What kills a child’s response is not the absence of punishment. It is the inflation of the currency.

So the discipline I am describing is the gentle, harder one, and it turns on a distinction we seldom name aloud — between the follow-up and the follow-through. A follow-up is something you do to another person’s task: you chase it, you remind, you ask once more where things stand. A follow-through is something you do to your own word: you complete the thing you promised. Say it once, clearly. Wait — long enough for the instruction to be carried out, because the follow-through is itself a skill that takes a few seconds to perform. Then follow through, every single time, with calm consequence and warm reward, so that the first telling carries genuine weight. The error of the anxious parent is to believe the cure lies in following up harder; the truth is the reverse. She does her own follow-through — she keeps the consequence she named — and she withholds the follow-up, the repetition that would otherwise do the child’s remembering for him. To chase a child’s task is to carry his accountability on his behalf, which is exactly how he learns never to carry it himself. What kills a child’s response to instruction is not the absence of punishment. It is the inflation of the currency — the endless reprinting of the same command until each one is worth nothing, and the child, sensibly, declines to spend his attention on a coin that has lost its value.

· · ·

And then the child grows up and carries the exchange rate of his childhood into the office. He is the reason so many of us deliver only half of what we plan. It is fashionable to blame this on poor planning, and there is something to that — Kahneman and Tversky’s planning fallacy is close to universal, and even superb cultures watch their timelines slip. But the difference is decisive. In the culture that says it once, a slipping date is flagged the moment it appears and the plan is rescued; in the culture of the chorus, the slip is hidden until the day it becomes a crisis, because no one has yet sung the second verse and so the matter is not, in the mind of the one who must act, real. Same slippage. Two entirely different fates.

The boss, meanwhile, says it once. He has earned the right to, and he assumes you have earned the right to be told once. The young employee raised on repetition reads that single instruction the way he read his mother’s first call up the stairs — as a draft, a trial balloon, something not yet binding. He waits for the follow-up that, in a serious workplace, never comes — and by the time he grasps that the follow-through was his alone to supply, the work is late.

· · ·

The same coin turns up in a more intimate exchange. Now and then I lend money — to genuine cries for help, always against a repayment plan the borrower has drawn up himself. In every case so far the money has come back late, and that has never been my grievance; plans slip, and I, of all people, have spent these paragraphs arguing that the slip be forgiven. My grievance is what happens on the day itself. The phone goes dead. The message sits unread beneath two blue ticks. The borrower, who knew the date because he named it, simply vanishes upon it.

For a long time I read this as contempt, and it is nothing of the sort. The advance call I longed for — Araap Cheison, the fifteenth will not hold, I wanted you not to wait for it — is, in the language of psychology, a response of guilt: guilt fixes on the deed and moves to repair it. The disappearance is a response of shame: shame fixes on the self, finds it unbearable to be seen as a failure, and so it withdraws. Two engines, the same debt, opposite behaviours. It was never the money. It was the silence — for I had asked for the repair, and shame trades only in concealment.

And here the childhood habit returns, not as the cause but as the alibi. The urge to hide from a creditor is as old and as universal as debt itself; what the culture of the chorus adds is the story that lets the hiding feel innocent. If he does not ask again, he has forgotten. The obligation is treated as unreal until it is re-asserted, and so silence is quietly reclassified from theft to mere lapse. Repetition does not create the urge to hide. It launders it.

Repetition does not create the urge to hide. It launders it.

· · ·

What we are really cultivating, then, is not obedience. That is the part the harsh disciplinarian and the indulgent parent both miss from opposite ends. The aim is not a child who flinches at a command, because the flinching child becomes the employee who performs only when watched and stalls the moment the supervisor leaves the room — which is precisely the worker no one wants. The aim is internalisation: the plan, the instruction, the standard taken inside and made the child’s own. Diana Baumrind’s decades of work point to the same conclusion every time. The authoritative parent — high in warmth and high in structure, generous with the reasons behind the rule — raises the self-regulating adult. The authoritarian parent — long on demand, short on warmth, fluent in punishment — raises compliance under surveillance and not much else. Deci and Ryan would say the first parent supports autonomy and the second merely controls it, and the self-binding adult is grown only by the first. Martin Hoffman found the mechanism in the smallest gesture: the parent who briefly explains why builds a conscience the child carries everywhere, while the parent who only imposes builds a behaviour that evaporates the instant no one is looking.

Say it once. Mean it. Explain it where explanation is owed. Follow through with warmth and without fail. That is not softness and it is not severity; it is the narrow path between them, and it is the path that produces the technician who runs the trial to the minute in July because he committed to it in January.

· · ·

I should confess that none of this reached me first from the journals. It reached me through my wife, Ednah, who is a trained teacher and who knew in her body what I had to be argued into with citations. It was she who told me to say a thing to our children once and then to act, and to drop the well-meaning repetition I had mistaken for patience. It took me an embarrassingly long while to see what she saw — that each time I said it again I was not being kind; I was quietly killing the very initiative I most wanted to grow, and enrolling my own children in the chorus. That is the giving half of the discipline, and it is the half I now defend without flinching. We have to stop it, all of us, while the children are still young enough to learn that a first word is a real one.

The receiving half I learned more recently, and at my own expense. Not long ago my sister wrote to me. Hey Bro, she said, I wanted to remind you of the promise. I love my nephew Collins, who is leaving for abroad, and I had made a promise on his account and wired it into every calendar I keep, the mental one and the physical one alike. I had every intention, and the presence of mind, to go back to her the moment my plans wavered and say plainly, Sorry, Sis, I won’t make it. I never had to; I was aligned with what I had committed to do. And yet I was offended. Not by the asking — by the reminder. I turned it over for a long time before I understood why.

What her one line had touched was not my calendar but my self-portrait. I am a disciplined man and a Christian; I have read the verse in which the Lord says to let your Yes be Yes and your No be No, and I am not ashamed to say I am sorry, I cannot make it on the day I cannot. To be reminded, then, felt like a soft suggestion that my Yes might not be Yes — and that is why so small a sentence stung so far out of proportion to its size. The wound was to the man I had built, not to the schedule he keeps.

But I have had to admit the harder thing, and it is the thing this whole essay obliges me to admit. By its very creed, my sister did exactly right. She did not go silent. She did not leave the promise unspoken and trust me to forget it — which is precisely the disappearance I cannot forgive in others. She used her voice. And her reminder was almost certainly no audit of my word at all; it was a mother’s nerves about a son leaving for another country, reaching for one more thing to hold on the way to the airport. I had received a frightened mother’s small need for reassurance as a charge against my integrity. The very love that put Collins on that journey is what made the reminder inevitable — and what made it not about me.

So I have come to see that the discipline has two halves, and that I had mastered only one. Say it once — to your children, your colleagues, the world. And let yourself be told once — by a sister, a friend, anyone who loves you enough to nudge — without the telling landing as an accusation. The man truly secure in his Yes has no need to bristle at a follow-up, because his follow-through will answer for itself on the day, and needs no reminder to vouch for it. Offence is the tell of a Yes still seeking confirmation; quiet delivery is the Yes that no longer needs any. I say I hate repetitions, and I do. What I am still learning is not to hate the people who, out of love, occasionally hand me one.

For this, in the end, is what we owe our children and what we might still learn ourselves: to be told a thing once, and to let the telling be enough — both when we are the ones who speak it, and when, in love, it is spoken back to us.

Dr. Seronei Chelulei Cheison writes on science, education, agribusiness and development at the intersection of Germany and East Africa.

The failed parenting in Kenya: From "Family Values" to "Maid Values"

On Absentee Parenting

For Whom,
Araap Musee

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How a country learned to subcontract its children — and was astonished by what came back.

By Dr. rer. nat. habil. Dr. Seronei Chelulei Cheison

We begin where the man ends.

Kiptangus stands at the lip of a grave dug into the red earth of the home his father built, and he finds that he cannot weep. The eulogy is being read, and he listens to it the way one listens to a stranger’s curriculum vitae. The list is impressive. School fees never once late. A permanent house, tiled and wired and fenced. Twelve head of grade cattle. A title at the church and another at the cooperative, each earned across thirty years of mornings that began before the sun. The mourners under the white tent nod. It is a fine summary of a successful man.

And it is, Kiptangus understands with a cold that has nothing to do with the morning, an invoice. Every line is a payment. The eulogy for his father is a statement of account, because provision is the only thing anyone gathered here can truthfully say of him. Ask them what the man laughed at, what he feared in the dark, what he believed when no one was funding the belief, and the tent would fall into a silence longer than the prayers.

This is the answer to the question the man shouted his whole life without ever knowing it was a question. For whom, Araap Musee, for whom — for this. For a son who can recite his assets and not his character. He chased life so hard, so far, for so long, that he became, to his own blood, a line of credit with a face.

He became, to his own blood, a line of credit with a face.

Then the phone vibrates against Kiptangus’s thigh, through the dark wool of the funeral suit. He does not need to look. He knows the sender. It is the bursar at his own son’s boarding school, reminding him that second-term fees fall due on Friday. Three generations stand at this graveside: the man being lowered into the soil, the man standing over him, and the boy at home with the house help who will, in his turn, stand exactly here. The cycle is not a theory Kiptangus once read in a newspaper. It is buzzing in his pocket, live, over his father’s open grave.

To understand how a man comes to bury a stranger and call him father, we must walk backward — past the title and the cattle and the tiled roof — all the way to the ninety days.

Because ninety days is all his mother was ever given. The law calls it mercy: three months of maternity leave, fully paid, and then the salary that built this house required her back at her desk in Nairobi. Her husband, by the same law, was granted two weeks. When that lopsided arithmetic was once challenged in court as discrimination, the judges upheld it, ruling that the mother’s three months and the father’s fortnight were not unequal but merely different in purpose. So let us be clear about what the statute itself has decreed: the mother is the one who stays, and the father is the one who returns to chasing life. The absent man on the touchline is not a failing the law regrets. He is the law’s own design.

And the mother? She is a teacher, a secretary, a clerk at a counter. On the ninetieth day she faces a choice that is not a choice. Keep the infant at her breast and lose the post that pays the rent and the fees, or surrender the infant and save the overtaxed payslip. There is no third door. She does not hand her baby to a stranger because she is cold. She hands him over because the alternative is hunger, and she has run the figures a hundred times in the dark.

The stranger she hands him to is Tina, and Tina is ten years old.

Tina left a classroom in Kakamega she will not see again, the tenth of eleven children in a homestead where subtracting one mouth and adding five hundred shillings a month is not cruelty but survival. A blessing, her parents call it, and inside the brutal logic of their poverty they are not wrong. She was released the way you release a heifer to a buyer: as relief. So a child of ten is set to raise a child of one, in a city she cannot name, for a wage that flows past her to Kakamega and never once rests in her own small hands.

The household that took her knows she is ten. It does not blink, because in the transactional home the only question ever asked of labour is its price, and a ten-year-old is the cheapest formation money can buy. The law forbids her very presence in that kitchen — no child under thirteen may be employed, and the Constitution promises her a desk in a free school instead of a sink in a stranger’s house. But the statute was drafted for factories and chimneys, and it left a hole the exact shape of a home: there is no minimum working age for domestic service at all. The one sector that swallows children like Tina by the thousand is the one the law forgot to guard. She is, at once, illegal and unprotected. And the men who understand this act in the cold confidence of impunity, because the courts, by the country’s own admission, almost never come.

I will not narrate what is done to her. To dramatise it would be to join the crowd that uses her. It is enough, and it is the whole indictment, to say it plainly: a ten-year-old girl, slapped by an exhausted mistress and exposed to far worse by men who have correctly calculated that no one is counting, is the instrument by which a Kenyan household manufactures its “family values.” The same household that will scrub its son clean on Sunday and deliver him to a pastor to be lectured on purity, while the child in its kitchen is violated on Tuesday.

This is the first hand that forms Kiptangus, and from it he learns, before he can speak, the foundational lesson of his class: that the closest bond is a contract, and contracts lapse. Tina will be gone by his second birthday, poached by a neighbour for three hundred shillings more, and another stranger will take her place, and another after her. By two he is at a daycare that opens before dawn and closes after dusk, spending more waking hours in institutional keeping than in the company of the two people who made him.

And here a quiet amputation is performed. Tina spoke Luhya; the girl who replaced her spoke Kamba; his parents perform their class in English. So Kiptangus never receives his grandmother’s tongue, and this matters far more than sentiment. The mother tongue was the cable along which the proverbs travelled, the riddles, the stories told at the fire, the entire moral grammar of the ridge. Sever the cable and “family values” have no wire on which to arrive. Kiptangus is not raised without values. He is raised without the means of ever receiving his own people’s.

At six the metal trunk is packed for the first time — far too early, and not out of any necessity — and Kiptangus is sent away to board at Kapsimotwa Preparatory School, where he will live out the whole of Class One through Class Eight. From the age of six, home is no longer the place he lives. It is the place he visits in the holidays. His de facto parents are now teachers with sixty other children in the class — underpaid, overworked, and frequently fighting undisclosed battles of their own — paid to teach arithmetic yet silently expected to manufacture men, torn between pedagogy and parenting, with the time, the means and the authority for none of it. No teacher, however gifted, can raise the character of a child posted to his chalky hands by a parent he will never meet. This is where the word stops being a pun and becomes the literal arrangement. The father is no longer a parent. He is a payer. A PAyRENT: a quarterly transaction with a surname.

I must be careful here, because the dormitory is not the villain, and I would be a hypocrite to pretend it is. I was a barefoot herdsboy on the plains of Mogobich, in Kapundi, Uasin Gishu, from the age of four. I did not sit in a classroom until I was ten, at Chemenei Basic School, and I did not see the inside of a boarding house until I was eighteen, when I left the plains for Kapsabet Boys — and by then the work was already finished. My grandmother, Opot Tera — stoic, unlettered, immovable — had spent those years pressing into me the whole social, cultural and family pedagogy of our people, so that the school which received me at eighteen got a man already made and merely educated him. That is the distinction the modern parent has mislaid. The danger was never the boarding school as such; it is the age at which the child is surrendered, and whether anyone troubled to form him first. The smallholder who sells a cow to send a fourteen-year-old to Kapsabet is making a sacrifice, and surrendering a child whose character is already set. The urban professional who boards a six-year-old whom no one has yet formed is making a convenience, and handing the institution a blank slate to become the boy’s only maker. The first is sacrifice. The second is disposal, dressed in a good school badge. The villain is not the school. It is the provider-script: the inherited conviction, half missionary and half migrant-labour economy, that a father’s entire duty is the fee, and the rest will see to itself.

What scraps of his conscience the school does not claim are handed to the chapel and the holiday camp. The men entrusted with his character are chaplains and camp preachers who theorise about chastity and purity in a register that has never once met the realities of that house or this decade. Formation, like laundry, has been outsourced to a vendor with no knowledge of the facts.

From Kapsimotwa he passes, on the strength of his marks, to Alliance High School, Form One to Four — the most coveted gate in the republic, and another four years away from anyone who shares his blood. And on the visiting day the script stands fully exposed, because the visiting day is, in practice, mothers’ day. It is the mothers who come — stretched, overworked, and present nonetheless — while the fathers are away chasing life. For whom, Araap Musee? For the very boy you are not visiting.

At thirteen or fourteen, somewhere in this same stretch, Kiptangus is also sent to the Menjo. Among us Nandi, the seclusion was never about what the body endures there — of that we do not speak, and need not. It was the red line drawn across a life, the crossing from boyhood to manhood, and the men who walked a boy over that line mattered more than anything else in it. I went to the Menjo at nineteen, old enough to understand exactly what I faced and what was being asked of me. The Motiriot, the teacher who received us, was a revered man, a mentor in what it meant to belong. What was endured was the least of it. The teaching was the whole.

What is delivered to the Menjo today is a boy of thirteen who cannot follow a sentence in his own mother tongue, who hears the word Suiyee and cannot tell whether it names an animal, an object, or some craft come down from the sky. He is pushed across into “manhood” by a Motiriot who is, at his best, half-inebriated through most of it — haggard, unkempt, foul-mouthed — and we have talked ourselves into believing that this man, uncultured as he is, is the cure for the father who was never there. He is not. A drunk teacher cannot bestow what a present father failed to give. And here is the whole bitter sum of it: this country has a great many fathers. It has very few dads.

This country has a great many fathers. It has very few dads.

By now the dormitory is Kiptangus’s family and the television is his elder. He has not lived inside a real household since the age of six, so the only family he has ever studied at close range is the one on the screen, and the values he carries are therefore soap-opera values: the melodrama, the theatrical betrayals and reconciliations, the wealth forever mistaken for love. Over all of this settles the most toxic layer of them all. The men broadcast as the nation’s winners are politicians flaunting an opulence with no visible labour behind it, hurling insults at one another, and being rewarded for both with power and applause. From them Kiptangus absorbs the true national syllabus of success: not work but theft rebranded as hustle, not restraint but volume, not service but self. The farmless thieves who steal with a pen are not the cautionary tale. They are the men he watches winning, nightly, in colour.

Then Pwani University, and one more move away — though by now the move means nothing, for there is no home to leave. He is handed his degree in his early twenties, fully formed: by Tina and the house helps who followed her, by Kapsimotwa, by Alliance, by the chaplain and the screen, and by not one single person who loved him.

This is no figure I have invented. I once shared a corridor at the Technical University of Munich with a fellow Kenyan, a young man reading for his doctorate. He had been handed to day-care at two, to kindergarten at four and five, to boarding from six to thirteen, to high school until seventeen, and to university at eighteen — the full length of the conveyor, without a single gap. When I met him he was twenty-nine, near the summit of everything his schooling had promised, and he told me, quite without drama, that he had never known his parents. The very people who should have given him his mother tongue, his family’s values, his respect and his honour and his integrity, were strangers to him; he met them at his graduations, and each time they went their separate ways once the photographs had been taken. I set this down because it is the rebuttal to the only defence the system has left — that the results speak for themselves. They do: the conveyor does not fail to produce achievers. It produces achievers who never knew their parents, and files that under success.

· · ·

Let me say plainly where I stand in all this, because I have refused it, and the refusal is what taught me how rare the option is.

Ednah and I decided early that we would keep no house help. I had been that barefoot herdsboy; she had been a house help herself after high school. We both knew, in the body, what it costs to be the child pulled out of class to raise someone else’s. We would not become the obstacle between another Tina and her schoolroom. But I will not dress this as pure virtue, because it was not. We could refuse only because we had somewhere to refuse into — our children could go to their grandmothers, and now and then a mature, post-school relative could come and stay with us. We still held a fragment of the village in our hands. That is the whole point, and the bitter one. We made a choice that most Kenyan parents simply cannot make. The system has bulldozed the village and now demands that each family rebuild it single-handed, from nothing, in a rented flat in a city, and only the fortunate few who kept a grandmother within reach can answer the call.

And the wider community has not merely shrunk; it has switched sides. On the plains where I herded, a boy idling when he should have been minding the cattle could expect correction from any adult who passed, for the discipline of the village was a single shared instrument and no one thought it an intrusion. Today, let a stranger so much as caution a child kicking his ball through a neighbour’s window, and Mama Kamamii descends — not to thank him, but to shriek that he is molesting her child. The village has not only stopped raising other people’s children; it now guards its right to raise none. Society has appointed itself spectator, and looks on, arms folded, while the family is dismantled by its subcontractors.

This is the scourge, and it is not located in any single handoff. It is in the architecture. The old village distributed the care of a child among the committed: many hands, overlapping, accountable to one another, sharing a tongue and a code. The modern chain distributes that same care among the contracted: every hand present, and not one of them committed — the ten-year-old, the daycare, the pastor, the overstretched teacher, the glowing screen.

Every hand present, and not one of them committed.

Kenya has industrialised the outsourcing of formation, and then it stands astonished at the output. But commitment is the one input that no invoice can buy, and it was always the only one bearing any load.

· · ·

So we return to the graveside, where Kiptangus stands over the man who provided everything and was present for nothing, his own phone buzzing with the fees of the son he is raising in the identical way. He came to mourn and found he could only audit. The cycle does not need a villain; it needs only a busy generation that mistook provision for presence, and a statute that blessed the mistake. Kiptangus will go home from this funeral, and he will pay the bursar on Friday, and one Saturday years from now he will stand on a school touchline, the only father among the mothers, and shout at a sky that does not answer.

For whom, Araap Musee.
For whom.

❦

About the Author

Dr. rer. nat. habil. Dr. Seronei Chelulei Cheison

He was a barefoot herdsboy on the plains of Mogobich, in Uasin Gishu, and did not enter a classroom until he was ten. Formed by his grandmother and the village he writes of here, he went on from Kapsabet to Egerton University, a doctorate at Jiangnan University in China, and a habilitation at the Technical University of Munich. He is the founder and chief executive of Sinonin Biotech GmbH in Lower Saxony, runs Sinonin Tea and Kipkenda Poultry in Nandi County, and serves on the advisory board of WIDU.africa. Writing at the meeting point of Germany and East Africa — on science, education, agribusiness and development — he is at work on a memoir, Living on the Edge: The Tribulations and Triumphs of an African Herdsboy. He and his wife, Ednah, raised their children without a house help.