We all owe a responsibility to each other as humans. We need to coexist peacefully with each other to achieve happiness as well as our life goals. To coexist peacefully, we ought to exhibit some positive values and morals most of which we are taught from the moment we are born.

I grew up in an environment where morals are taught to people especially children through telling of short moral stories. All of these stories are aimed at making us learn to do things that are required of us as responsible individuals in ten society. The power of moral stories lies in the fact that they are never forgotten after years of being told, and when a child makes mistakes, he can easily remember those moral stories and the lessons they teach. It is apparent that giving mere advise to children does not hold any candle to telling them stories that has those advise as moral stories.

Today, I've decided to compile a lot of short moral stories or illustrations that were told during my childhood days

Stinginess and Unforgiveness

As a Nigerian child, you must have heard you parents give you the perfect description of a stingy and unforgiving person. Each time you display unnecessary signs of stinginess or you refuse to forgive someone who has wronged you, you begin to hear something like, "a person who bears grudges turns ug!y, sk!ny and bony overtime with their heads bigger than their body. Their buttocks is always the first to dry out because stinginess is a parasite which feed on people".

Such story is enough to make us forgive our neighbors because no one want to look as was described

Talking too much and grumbling

Most of the times, we are told that talking too much is bad especially when what we are saying is unnecessary, but we do not really tend to listen. So a story is told about a child created perfect by God but became disfigured because he uses his mouth too much. He would always comment unnecessarily on matters that never concerned him anf he would always grumble especially wgen sent on an errand. Each time he grumbled or talked unnecessarily, his mouth would enlongate and soon enough, his mouth was touching the floor. I never wanted to be like this boy in the story so I learnt to only talk when necessary and to stop grumbling. No child would like a moith so long that it touches the ground

Gluttony

If as a child, you ate and always wanted to eat everything, you will be told the story of a child who is of same gender as you. The child wanted to have it all and to eat it all until one day he collected some candy from a witch who turned him into a cockroach. I never wanted to be turned into a cockroach, so that story was enough to make me have absolute control over my throat.

Stubbornness

If you are stubborn, you are always regarded as thick headed and the story of what happened to stubborn people during the era of slave trade would be used to educate you. If you are too stubborn, you will receive threats like, "I'll tell the government that you are stubborn and they will ship you off to the desert". False stories of children who have faced same fate would be told to you. I never got to know how false these stories were until I grew up and realized it was a way of getting me to behave in order.

Those are just sent instances o remember, but most of all I'll never forget the story of how you will loose your belly button if you are late for running an errand.

Even though these stories put fear in the heart of children and they are bound to find out how false the stories are when they must have grown up, the purpose of those stories are still achieved. Your never forgetting those stories is a reminder that even though they are false, there are consequences for every bad moral we display.

If I do get married and have children in the future, moral stories will be a necessary part of teaching them good morals. Sometimes sitting them down and delivering long epistles advise may not be as effective as those stories.

What do you think? That moral stories should be a necessary part of teaching our children morals? The comment is yours.

Thanks for coming by😍

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