Most people already know the story about me and my round face issues.

Most people already know the story about me and my round face issues.

But for the uninitiated, I have always said that you need a coffee can so that you can use the bottom to draw a circle for my face, maybe not quite everyday but still relatively close.

This is an issue that was first revealed to me in Grade 4 in my aunt's class, when I was only eight and oblivious of the things that made women feel beautiful or not.

It's an announcement that got me paging through magazines and catalogues with the hope that a model with features similar to mine would be perched high on a pedestal of beauty. I cannot say there were any. My mind was too busy drumming it in that luck was not on my side.

And with the recent unveiling of the secrets we've always known in the book, The Secret, I have learnt that the more I speak ill of my face, the rounder it gets.

Yet I unveil this obsession in the hope of getting a flattering contradiction saying: "No, your face is not round, it's oval." A counterclaim that leaves me with more distrust for such people. It's a Catch-22 situation and I have realised that not even a threat to arrest me would get me to lay it off.

All my mother should have done was to keep reassuring me that my face, round as it is, is a gorgeous face.

I don't know how parents can be so apprenticed to the things that make or break their kids. Isn't the whole point of being a parent having the ability to detect harmful behaviour and attitude before it even happens?

Instead, they all echo and fawn on the old facade that children are the future but, as many of us know them, they are also little pricks who wreak havoc with their peers, especially the pretty ones.

These little devils are at best little barbarians who have managed to get their peers to solicit money for them, bunk school and, in worst-case scenarios, get their victims to take their own lives.

A colleague's child was told by a boy in their class that she is ugly. She was traumatised. It's going to take a village to convince that girl that the nasty little boy was making a cruel joke.

I also know of someone who was called a kwerekwere by his classmates and experienced xenophobia at 10. He has not recovered. A doctor was told he was a retard and therefore failed Grade 10 four times.

Children are ignorant of the hatred meted out to their peers and the consequences. Parents therefore need to treat them with the love and discipline that can only mould them. My take is, no child who is treated with kindness and respect will inflict verbal and physical harm on another.

So when my little one was counting all the beauties according to her standards, and she got to her second hand, I asked: what about you? She replied that she was their queen and they were the princesses. I never told her that, just that she is a beautiful child. Yes, she has my round face.