Growing up in many African homes comes with lessons that shape us deeply. Some are beautiful. Some are heavy. Some we spend our whole adult lives unlearning. For every tradition we have to follow, there are quiet wounds carried in the name of respect, endurance, or culture.
There are the silences we were taught to keep, the sacrifices that were praised while they broke us, and the rules that taught us our worth was measured by how much we could give up. Many of us have had to sit with those memories and ask ourselves hard questions: Do I want my children to carry this too?
These seven women share with honesty, pain, and hope the things they refuse to pass on to their own children:
“My mum taught me to endure everything because I’m a woman. To stay polite when hurt, to serve the men in my life without expecting anything back, to carry the weight while they rested. She made it feel like being a woman meant being silent, selfless, and always responsible.
My children will never go through that.”
— Zara, 28, Nigeria
“I’m not asking my kids not to touch the biggest meats in the pot or stopping them from using the best looking plates in the kitchen. I grew up hearing, “it’s for your daddy” or “it’s for visitors” and that affected me negatively. When I left home to my own place, I became obsessed with having the best things for myself that it almost became a destructive behaviour. Everyone in my home gets the best of everything possible, especially my kids.”
— Asmaa, 30, Morocco
“One thing I’m not passing on to my daughter is people pleasing; putting everyone’s needs first before mine. And most people don’t even deserve it. I want her to be soft but stronghearted, very assertive and loving herself first always.”
— Temilola, 34, Nigeria
“Dismissive behavior. My mum tends to dismiss subjects and issues that makes her uncomfortable and it really hurt me growing up. I remember we used to have a boy who stayed with us, he was a few years older than I was, and I caught him peeping at me from an opening in the bathroom whenever I was having my bath, I was in SS3 then. I remember telling my mum and she dismissed me. I was deeply heartbroken and never told her of any kind of abuse I encountered with men later on. Being a mum now, I would never repeat such with my daughter.”
— Pamela, 35, Ghana
1. Smacking my child.
2. Telling my child not to speak when adults are speaking.
3. Not having difficult conversations with my children (sex talk, relationship talk, etc).
— Ajoke, 40, Nigeria
“I grew up in a very strict Christian home and we went to church everyday. My mum was a good mother in many ways except for loving the church more than her family. So when I told her our pastor assaulted me when he found me in the church alone and showed her the inappropriate messages he sent before that, she seized my phone, deleted everything and blamed me for tempting a man of God. My mum defended my abuser because he was a pastor. I’m never putting any other thing first over my children.”
— Esther, 23, Kenya
“I am not going to treat my child like a statue without real feelings or a brain, whether she is a year old or twenty.
My mother never expressed any deep emotions to me. She never let me in on how things really were. I grew up carrying on with so many wrong assumptions about my own life. Many will say she was just protecting me. Well, even when became an adult, she kept hiding important things from me.
I am not doing that to my daughter. I am going to tell her how I am feeling and what is going on in our lives. I will do it in a way that is age appropriate, of course, but I will always do it. She deserves that.”
— Temitope, 33, Nigeria
Breaking cycles is not easy. It means looking back with clear eyes, grieving what we needed but never got, and choosing to love differently. These stories are proof that motherhood can be rewritten, that we can keep what made us strong and leave behind what made us small.
