Parenting ABCs for a better T&T

By Lara Pickford-Gordon

snrwriter.camsel@catholictt.org

There have been a series of videos giving the ABCs of parenting on TV6 and online platforms. Each of the 26 videos focuses on a letter and characteristic of parenting and offers tips.

Viewers would have seen different spokespersons including Stephon Felmine, social media personality; Seventh Day Adventist Pastor Clive Dottin; Rev Joy Abdul-Mohan from the Presbyterian Church; Clinical Psychologist Dr Katija Khan; and the Catholic Commission for Social Justice consultant Leela Ramdeen.

The group behind the videos is the Call to Action for Social Change Foundation (CTA), comprising multi-religious, multi-disciplinary individuals from civil society advocating and promoting social responsibility and accountability in T&T.

In response to crime and violence being perpetuated in society, the CTA is focusing on four areas: Parenting and Family Life, Education, Judiciary and Law Enforcement, and Culture. Each area has a steering committee, which after research, will develop ideas for implementation.

In January, the Children’s Authority of Trinidad and Tobago received 560 reports of children in need of care and protection. A media release February 23 stated this was “greater than the average number of reports per month received in 2023”. Most of these reports were related to neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse.

Shaleeza Khan-Ali, the President of the CTA and Dionne Guischard, the Chair of the Parenting and Family Life Committee spoke to The Catholic News about the ABCs of Parenting, the group’s first initiative.

The cause of violence in the society is multifaceted. Guischard said her committee had identified dysfunction in families and the nurturing of emotional and psychological development of the family members. Emotional and psychological development involve being emotionally intelligent, resilient, and being able to manage conflict well. “The family is the foundation of society so if the family is in disrepair, the society is in disrepair,” Guischard said.

Roles in the family

One of the factors contributing to families not functioning optimally is members not understanding their roles. It is taken for granted that parenting is natural and instinctual. Guischard said parenting best practices are learned through experience and “generational knowledge” handed down.

Daughters learn practical skills such as breastfeeding technique, and inculcation of values, “how to socialise children in a certain way,” Guischard said.

She continued, “Right now, we have a society where we don’t have that intergenerational transmission of knowledge and best practices.”

When family members do not understand their roles, it impacts how the family functions, its capacity to communicate well, manage conflict, and ensure members live in a “cooperative and love-filled environment”.

She added that boundaries can blur when parents behave more as a friend to their child. As a result, the child does not understand authority in the home or when they go into the school.

Role of community

When Guischard gave birth to her daughter, she was surrounded by a community but many young women and men raising children alone do not have this support. She acknowledged that she could not answer this fully but believes that foreign culture and the adoption of “global norms” may be influences.

She added, “a large part of it is living in a silo, which is really weird, because when we look at them on tv, they are family oriented but really and truly it is a lot of aloneness, a lot of, ‘the people living in my own house are the only people I focus on’.”

Guischard suggested that the first thing needed is to rebuild the idea of community by connecting the silos. “As a mother, as a father in the community, a young person now having a child for the first time, just lend that support, lend that listening ear. Don’t always be quick to give advice but just be there, let them know, ‘if you have a question, you can come to me’ and so they just know there is somebody there invested in their child’s development”.

There must also be systems and structure to assist the young, single parents or families living in extreme poverty.

Another major issue is the absence of the male father figure which affects both male and female children.

The ABCs

Guischard said the parenting committee worked with the CTA’s communications committee to develop scripts for each letter. First, they agreed on the 26 characteristics they wanted to highlight, then the core message was developed.

“When we developed the scripts, we looked internally and externally to CTA to see personalities who are best fit for each script,” she said.

While there are many characteristics which could be focused on for one letter, Khan-Ali said her advice was there should be different iterations.

Guischard explained: “For ‘A’ we may have actually had three characteristics and it was when we developed the core message, talk through the core messages, we recognise that, for example, A for ‘Accountability’, we needed to get that message out…as we progressed through the alphabet, we basically wanted to tell a story. You would find you will see linkages between the characteristics”.

She illustrated, that if a parent is Accountable and sets Boundaries and Communicates well with their children, it is easier to establish Discipline. For ‘Z’, all the messages came together.

They did not disclose what this letter stood for, so it is up to viewers to keep watching to find out. Among the other characteristics were Gratitude, Feelings, Nurture, Quality Time, Important, Prayer.

“For me, the message [for Z] really resonated and tied everything together,” Guischard said. Social reach and increased awareness are two goals set for evaluating the ABCs of parenting.

Preventive and corrective interventions are aimed at millennial parents because they are often the parents of younger children, but other parents and grandparents can benefit. The videos are intentionally concise, taking “social media culture” into consideration.

The analytics from engagement on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are positive, with members of the public saying thanks and even sharing their own parenting challenges. Facebook and Instagram had shares and a large reach but the most interaction was on TikTok with some videos having hundreds of shares.

More in-depth data collection will be done to see how the series performed with increasing awareness. The video series will be aired again but with the addition of probing questions and calls to action “to get that qualitative data”, Guischard said.

Khan-Ali disclosed that based on the videos, the CTA was invited to speak to parents of the Gloster Lodge Moravian School. This request came even before the trauma of the shooting outside the school on February 21. They visited the school on February 26.

The CTA wants to collaborate with other non-governmental organisations which are also doing “good work on the ground”. They hope that their messages will become so familiar that it will be part of discussion.

Khan-Ali asked for corporate support for the CTA’s work. Anyone interested in assisting can visit the website cta-tt.org and call 755-6186. Individuals willing to get involved can also make contact.

“We do need all hands on deck,” she said.