As odd as it seems to have a profound message coming to us via Lil Wayne, he definitely serves one up in his new How to Love video. If you haven’t seen the video, it focuses on a little girl who grows up watching her mother go through a series of abusive and troubled relationships. Without knowing what a loving relationship is supposed to be, the girl follows in those troubled footsteps as an adult with tragic results.
Yes, it feels more than a little hypocritical for a man who has built his career in large part on the degradation of women and has more baby mommas than I care to count to be doling out love lessons. But at its base, the message is part of why it’s so important for sites like BMWK to exist. As parents, we are showing an entire generation how to love, and as a community, we’ve been pretty bad teachers.
In the black community especially, we have embraced this mantra that as long as I’m taking care of my kids, my personal relationships don’t matter. Yet contrary to what has become convenient for us to believe, when our kids grow up and are in their own relationships, they aren’t modeling their relationships after our parenting, they’re modeling their relationships after our relationships.
Whether we want to admit it or not, the choices that we make in our personal relationships are teaching our sons and daughters how to love and how to be loved in their own. Even outside of the extremes of the abusive relationships shown in the How to Love video, so much of what we are teaching them is problematic.
We need to take a serious look at ourselves and what our kids are copying. If we are honest with ourselves we’ll realize that as a community, we are not raising future husbands and wives because that’s not the love model that we’ve shown our children. We aren’t teaching our daughters that they deserve the respect of a man that’s going to come to them with a ring, and pledge the rest of their lives at bare minimum. Instead of showing them marriages built on commitment and respect, we’re showing them selfish unions full of disrespect and infidelity.
It’s a natural reaction to want to validate our own actions, and rush to our own defense instead of examining ourselves. But I challenge you BMWK family, today, whether you are a married or single parent, to truly take a look at what you are teaching your kids about how to love. Not how to love as a parent, but what template are you giving your children to copy for their future relationships.
Fathers, imagine that you were the man your daughter brought home in the future; are you good enough for her? Mothers, imagine that your daughter is in your relationship. Is that a place that you would want her to be? Are you setting your children up for future happiness, or are you giving them a future that includes all of the same mistakes that you’ve made.
Now realize that none of these scenarios are truly in your imagination. Just like we teach our children how to clean or read, they’re taking their lessons on how to love from us whether we like it or not. It’s time for us to examine our lesson plans and do what it takes to become worthy teachers.