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Gaya

If you grew up in a Nigerian home, certain sentences are so deeply embedded in your memory that you can hear them in your parent's exact voice, exact tone, exact volume, without even trying. You don't remember learning them. You just know them. They became part of the furniture of your childhood so early that you stopped noticing they were there.

This piece is about those sentences. Not to drag our parents, because honestly they were doing their best with tools that were handed to them by people who were also doing their best but some of what got handed down wasn't wisdom. It was pain that nobody stopped to examine before passing it along and the least we can do, for ourselves and for whoever comes after us, is finally look at it properly.

1. "You Are The Firstborn. You Should Know Better."

What it sounds like: A standard of responsibility. An expectation of maturity. A compliment, almost, about your capacity.

What it's actually doing: Assigning us an emotional and practical role we never applied for, and then punishing us when we fail to perform it perfectly. The firstborn child in most African homes is the trial run, the one who absorbed all the parenting uncertainty, the one who was required to be mature before maturity was developmentally possible. "You should know better" is almost always said to a child who is being held to an adult standard that no child should be held to, by parents who were themselves held to impossible standards and never got to be children either.

The firstborn was not born knowing better. They were simply born first, into a house that needed someone to be the responsible one, and the job was assigned before they were old enough to refuse it. When we grow up being told we should know better, we grow up believing that being imperfect is a personal failure rather than a normal part of being human. We grow up apologising for existing at our actual age instead of the age they needed us to be.

2. "After Everything I've Done For You..."

What it sounds like: A reminder of sacrifice. A parent expressing hurt. A statement of love that has run out of patience.

What it's actually doing: Converting love into debt. This phrase turns everything our parents ever did for us, every school fee, every meal, every moment of showing up, into a ledger that we are now expected to repay with compliance, gratitude, and the permanent suspension of our own needs whenever those needs become inconvenient.

Love is not a loan. Choosing to have a child and caring for that child is not a transaction the child owes interest on for the rest of their life, but in many African homes, this phrase became the ultimate conversation-ender. It doesn't matter what we said, what boundary we tried to set, what need we expressed. "After everything I've done for you" resets the entire interaction to zero and places us back in a position of debt we can never fully repay, which is exactly the point. We who feel perpetually indebted never fully grow into our own authority. That is not always accidental.

What it sounds like: A parent defending their experience and authority. A check on arrogance.

What it's actually doing: Shutting down critical thinking and making disagreement feel like disrespect. This phrase does not actually want an answer. It is not the beginning of a conversation. It is the end of one, and the message it delivers, over and over, to a developing mind, is that questioning an adult is dangerous, that our own thinking cannot be trusted if it diverges from what we've been told, and that the safest thing is to agree, always, with whoever has authority over us.

The adults who said this were usually told the same thing by their own parents. They were raised in environments where hierarchy was absolute and questioning was punished, and they reproduced that environment not out of malice but out of the deep, unexamined belief that this is simply how authority works. The problem is that we, having never been allowed to think differently from the adults around us, grew into adults who don't fully trust our own judgment. Who defer compulsively to anyone who seems more certain. Who struggle to make decisions independently because we were never allowed to practice.

What it sounds like: A parent exercising authority. A shortcut when explanations feel like too much.

What it's actually doing: Teaching us that the reasons behind rules don't matter, that power doesn't require justification, and that asking why is itself a form of disobedience. We learned two things simultaneously growing up with this phrase: that authority is absolute and does not need to explain itself, and that our curiosity is an inconvenience rather than an asset.

This one often comes from parents who are simply exhausted, who don't have the energy to explain every decision, and who were themselves raised in environments where explanations were never offered. The transmission is not always intentional but the effect is consistent: we stopped asking why. We learned to accept rules without understanding them. We grew into adults who either blindly follow authority or rebel against all of it, because we were never shown a middle ground where authority and explanation could coexist.

What it sounds like: Practical advice about reputation and social consequences. A parent trying to protect us from judgment.

What it's actually doing: Making the opinions of people who are not in the room more important than the feelings of the people who are. This phrase shows up at every significant moment: when we want to make a choice that doesn't fit the expected mold, when something difficult has happened in the family, when someone needs help but getting that help would require admitting something is wrong.

"What will people say" is the reason therapy gets delayed, the reason mental illness goes unnamed, the reason abuse stays inside the house, the reason we were pushed into careers and marriages that look correct from the outside while quietly destroying us from the inside. It comes from a genuine place. In tightly networked communities where reputation is social currency, what people say genuinely matters. But it has been applied so broadly and so consistently that we were raised to manage our public image before we learned to manage our internal experience. The result is a generation of people who are very good at appearing fine and very bad at actually being fine.

6. "Stop Crying Before I Give You Something To Cry About."

What it sounds like: A parent trying to toughen us up. Discipline. A warning.

What it's actually doing: Teaching us that our emotions are an inconvenience, that expressing pain invites more pain, and that the correct response to distress is to suppress it immediately before someone decides to make it worse. This is one of the clearest examples of unexamined generational trauma in action. Our parents who said this were almost certainly told the same thing. They learned, as children, that crying was weakness, that emotions were dangerous, that composure was survival and they passed that lesson on, not because they are cruel, but because they genuinely believed it, because it worked for them in the environment they came from.

What it actually produced is a generation of us who do not know how to cry. Who cannot access our own grief. Who shut down emotionally at the exact moment we most need to feel something, because the association between feeling and pain was wired in so early that our bodies learned to intercept the feeling before it could arrive. This is not strength. This is a coping mechanism that has been mistaken for strength for so long that we forgot they were ever different things.

What it sounds like: Motivation. A push toward better. A reminder of what's possible.

What it's actually doing: Replacing our internal sense of worth with an external benchmark that moves every time we get close to it. "Look at your mate" is possibly the most efficient way to ensure we never feel like enough, because there will always be a mate who is doing something more impressive, earning more, marrying sooner, producing grandchildren faster, making the family prouder. The goalposts are not fixed. They are wherever whoever is being held up as the example currently stands.

We who were raised on comparison learned to measure our value relationally rather than internally. We don't ask "am I doing well?" We ask "am I doing better than?" and the answer to that question is always unstable, because it depends entirely on what someone else is doing, which is completely outside our control. This produces adults who cannot rest in their own accomplishments because the accomplishment only counts if it outpaces someone else's, who are quietly competitive in ways we don't fully understand, and who have never developed a genuine internal standard for what "enough" actually looks like.

Understanding where it came from does not automatically make it stop hurting. We can know, intellectually, that our parents said "look at your mate" because their parents said it to them, and still feel the sting of it in rooms where we are trying to believe we are enough.

Understanding is not the same as healing, but it is the beginning of something. It is the moment we stop receiving these phrases as truth and start receiving them as information about the people who said them, about what they were carrying, about what was handed down without examination through a line of people who were all just trying to survive.

Breaking a generational cycle does not require cutting off our families or declaring our childhoods a disaster. It requires something quieter and harder: noticing when the old phrases show up in our own mouths, or in our own heads when we talk to ourselves, and pausing long enough to ask whether we actually believe them or whether we are just repeating something that was repeated to us.

We are allowed to love our parents and also decide that some of what they handed us ends with us. Those two things are not opposites. They are, in fact, exactly what breaking a cycle looks like from the inside.

These phrases have been repeated so many times that they became background noise but underneath each one is an unresolved wound that was never examined, just passed on.

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