A Counseling Psychologist, Dr. Afusat Olanike Busari, has advised career women to work extra hard to maintain a loving relationship with their husbands and children, as well as inculcate in children the needed home training, thus bringing them up as responsible citizens.
Speaking at a forum in Oyo town, Dr. Busari noted that combining domestic works and other responsibilities with office duties is a challeging task facing career women in the country.
She stated that both duties are so important that attention to one at the expense of the other is very risky.
“It could be a choice between endangering her marriage, risking the upbringing of her children in strange hands, or on the other hand finding herself being inefficient and ineffective in the discharge of her office duties. To excel in both assignments require a number of coping strategies”.
Dr. Busari, a senior lecturer in the Department of Educational Psychology, formerly of the Federal College of Education (Special), Oyo, and now University of Ibadan (UI), pointed out that a good woman is expected to provide the feministic flavour in home management, as well as prove her worth in the office.
Stressing that women are naturally and traditionally assigned the task of home management, she described a perfect woman as one “who brings food home from everywhere, wakes very early in the morning and cooks food for her family and gives the servants their share”.
While urging women to pray for grace to be judicious in proper home management, the expert said loving their husbands and admiring them exceedingly is the only way excellent homes can be built.
According to her, “It is women’s role in the home to cook for their husbands and children. Any other arrangement is a mere assistance and should be under their close supervision. Note that as soon as the maid takes over the cooking, she competes with her mistress to share the man’s heart. This is because the short cut to a man’s heart is through his belly. This, of course, is the beginning of trouble in several homes”.
Lamenting that most women doesn’t bother about what their husbands put on and how it fits them, Dr. Busari counselled that it is women’s responsibilities to know their husbands’ finance in addition to dressing, in order to ensure proper home planning for the family finances.
Said she, “knowing the type of friends your husband keep is equally important, so as to save the family from danger of being misled. Women should also help in reminding their husbands of their roles to their extended family relatives. They help in keeping a peaceful and emotional atmosphere in the homes, which reflects beyond homes”.
The Counseling Psychologist, therefore, posited that women have strength of character clothed in graceful submissiveness, adding that “a wife takes a look at her husband, and without much effort knows where to help, or what to do”.
