So, who gets to eat the drumstick in your household?
Socialisation is a powerful tool, what we feed young minds will stay with them for generations to come.
This week, I stumbled across this comedian on TikTok called Wa Kairu, a young man whose skits almost made me rupture a vein. I laughed so hard, I had to stop watching him. It was one of those slow evenings at work and I was feeling antsy, waiting for work that wasn’t coming fast enough, so, I decided to cure my idleness with social media. Turns out that this hilarious personality, whose skits are in mother tongue, has been around for some time and has a huge following. When it comes to some things, I’m a late bloomer, which explains why I just discovered him.
Anyway, I could especially relate to one of the acts, which depicted what goes on in many homes during meal times, specifically the serving that each member of a family gets. For those who aren’t familiar with the parody, Wa Kairu plays a very rural Kikuyu woman/mother, though if you asked me, the character might as well be representative of all our mothers, in spite of which community they come from. But I was talking about food.
In this particular skit, the family was having a meal of rice and ugali, (of course, this had me doubling up with laughter because how do you even swallow that?). The daughter got half a serving spoon of rice, while the man of the house got a mountain of rice and two slabs of ugali piled on top. When she protested at how little she had gotten yet her father got a bottomless plate, the mother rudely told her to get married and run her household the way she saw fit.
I was amused because I and my generation grew up in such households where the father always got the biggest and juiciest portion of everything. And he was served first, meaning that he got the top layer, the others, the woman who cooked the food and the children, came second. This socialisation stayed with us and followed us to our homes, though nowadays, I have noticed that in most gatherings, the children are served first, followed by the men. However, in most homes, the man still gets the biggest plate and the most pieces of meat...
That skit also reminded me of my dad and his relationship with chicken. Growing up, he told us once, whenever they had chicken at home, for some reason, he would always get the wing or the neck, which, you must know, barely have any meat. You can guess who got the drumstick and other plump parts. His father.
This ‘injustice’, if I may call it that, triggered my dad’s dislike for chicken, particularly the drumstick, such that even when he grew up and got his own home and therefore the ‘right’ to the drumstick, he relinquished that right and would ask that the drumstick be removed from his plate. Talk of food trauma. And that is how in our home, we children got to enjoy the drumstick. And that is why, thanks to this socialisation I was exposed to, that children, too, have a right to the drumstick, that my children also get to eat the drumstick and other choice parts of a chicken when we have it.
Socialisation is a powerful tool, what we feed young minds will stay with them for generations to come, and will influence their lives in a significant way, even determining their success or failure. Food and how we serve it in our homes aside, what are we feeding our children’s minds at home as parents and in school as their teachers? Will what we are imparting prepare them for the fast-paced society we live in today?
Will the social norms we are passing on to them inspire them to stand out in society and make an impact in the space they are in, or are they norms that encourage them to remain in the background and keep their thoughts to themselves? In a nutshell, is their socialisation preparing them for success or failure?