As parents you must pay attention to your children, no matter how busy you are – Queenette Enilama

Queenette is a creative child educator and the founder of  Addvantage Educational Academy where she is the learning facilitator. She studied marine biology at the University of Calabar and  she is a certified customer service professional, An emotional intelligence performer. Queen has been  tutoring children for 10years now and impacting them not just academically but morally as well. She volunteers at government schools where she speaks to over 1000children on morals, values and etiquette, constantly inspiring and building their confidence. She believes every child is your child and there’s the gift of uniqueness in every one of them. 

Childhood
I would not say my childhood prepared me for what am doing right now but I can say that the traits were there. I have always had a large
heart people especially for children. I do remember im always asking my mum to adopt babies  as she was a nurse and would come home with the pain of how people abandon babies……. I would ask her why she can’t bring them home.

Addvantage Educational Academy…
Addvantage educational academy is a tutoring platform tailored as a learning support service to help children. We understand that children assimilate differently and some of them need a little push and extra support.  Just as the name implies there’s always an added advantage, so every tutor is expected to pass on or harness a skill in every child they tutor. We have a crop of tutors who are signed up on the platform we train and connect with parents. We also have a volunteering arm where I go to public schools in some communities to speak to children on morals, values and etiquette.

Why I chose Advocacy and Development as a career
Marine biology wasn’t a course after my heart, it was a means to an end (completing the education cycle). Looking back at it now think I made a rash decision but no knowledge is lost. I will say my love for humanity and the passion for children lead me to this path. I felt there was a missing link between childhood and adulthood that actually affects our development or thought patterns as adult.
 
“Our boys must make sense” initiative
Get groomed with Queenette (for boys) is a character building and mentoring program designed to instil the right moral value in boys.Men have a very important role to play in society, they are very influential, they provide leadership according to divine organogram and it appears that its no longer the case. What we find out now is that the male gender is the common culprit of most of the decadence happening in the society eg kidnapping, armed robbery ,domestic violence ,thuggery,  etc  . 

Its common knowledge that belief drives behavior, the right behavior has a multiplying effect on the knowledge we circulate or deliver in our children, what better time but now do we have to groom quintessential gentlemen to be bold, assertive, full of empathy and learn the right values. Sometimes we think men naturally come with a template from heaven, the gospel truth is they don’t know how because they were not raised like the girl child. The common phrase that says boys will be boys has restricted them from learning basic ethics and value. There are so many programs designed to empower the girl and quite few for the boys, we have to begin to make a deliberate and intentional effort to nurture our future gentlemen, this will reduce,to a large extent, a lot of unwanted happenings in the society.

Challenges
The peculiarity of the industry: we often think the people who engage in home lesson are people with little or no education or individuals who couldn’t land a decent job, I think the narrative is changing now.

Other project and activities
I do a lot of volunteering at public schools to speak to children about etiquettes, morals and values. It is important to me because the children in the public schools make up a large section of the population of the society. We also have the “Get groomed for educators” (tutors, teachers , head of schools and school administrators) during the summer holiday. I volunteer to teach less privilege children at the awesome Treasure foundation. There are quite are number of projects which are still in the incubation stage.

Greatest reward
Having tutored for 10years now, it gives me great joy to see children who found it difficult to excel personally and academically become confident, bold and assertive. They may not be top of their class but they’ve become knowledgeable and can take on any challenge, the joy the parents especially mother display when they see the progress their child has made. I do not believe that your grades are the true form to testing a child’s intelligence.. I have found myself in a position where I encourage a lot of people who have these low grades but have awesome intellectual perception and it gives me joy when I hear great feedbacks and result of progress.

Nigerian parents are not  well informed on sex education 
We’ve got a lot of information out there on this subject matter and parents need to arm themselves with these information, however teaching your child sex education should be somewhat a priority for every parent and this should be done as early as possible.

Factors contributing to child sexual abuse…
Environmental factors; An emotionally unsupportive family, poor parent and child relationship especially with fathers. Community factors; the general tolerance of sexual violence in the community, everyone pays little or no attention and cases where the accused can’t be punished because he or she is a son of the soil.

Poverty; Children who their parents can’t afford child care or support are usually vulnerable  to sexual exploitation ,imagin a child left alone without supervision because both parents have gone to work, this automatically leaves the child at the mercy of sexual predators negligence and lack of education.

I am a Woman of Rubies
The fact that I believe in the future of the Nigerian child and that there’s a gift of uniqueness in every child. I am not just a mother to my own but a mother to other children.

Final word for parents
Moments lost cannot be found again, they’re just gone. As parents you must “pay attention to your children no matter how busy you are.
Children have a little room where they store memories they never forget, we have to create the time to be part of children’s lives… it is very important, a process we have to enjoy, when we lose these moments with our children we can never get them back. All the broken adults we have around are as a result of one poor childhood and attention deprivation factor.