Empowering and supporting parents is the focus of an upcoming National Parenting seminar.
President of the National Parent Teacher Association, Walter Stewart, has linked rising deviant behaviour in society to inadequate parenting, stressing that many parents themselves require proper training and guidance to effectively shape and support their children.
“It seeks to identify the need for support for our parents because, as we are all aware, parenting is indeed a skill. And like with any other skill, there needs to be support and guidance in order to ensure that we can get it right as parents. We have been, as parents, labelled as ‘good for nothing’, ‘worthless’, ‘incompetent’, et cetera, and this seminar, this initiative is one of the ways that we are able to get the tools and equip ourselves with the confidence necessary in order to be able to parent our charges.”
President of the T&T Association of Psychologists, Victoria Siewnarine-Geelalsingh, noted that the Ministry of Homeland Security is collaborating with the NPTA and the TTAP in this event.
“We have recognised that one of the ways to treat the bigger problems like violence and criminality that come much later on is to focus on parenting and in order to do that we must understand the psycho social model of how children grow up, how parents grow up. And what I may say in a nutshell if I had to say one phrase about the seminar is that we are going to try to heal parents and equip parents with the tools that the need to heal their own children.”