Chief Magistrate urges national parenting programme

Chief Magistrate Ian Weekes has recommended the creation of a National Parenting Programme (NPP) that would receive help from the law courts.

Many young men may attribute a life of crime to poor parenting practices during their boyhood, he told the Annual Men’s Retreat of the Cave Hill Wesleyan Holiness Church held at its sister church in Ellerton, St George.

“Whether the children, in the long run, attended [the parenting sessions], there will be sessions for that…because, just like if you go to a guidance counsellor and your child has a particular problem, we may have to work with you, and we may have to have sessions separate with you and then with you in relation to the child,” he said.  

Weekes said he anticipates there would be sessions where parents and children get together under such a programme.

“You basically have to teach people how to raise children because they don’t have a clue,” said the top judicial officer. “They do not understand the influences, they don’t understand social media, they don’t understand their [children’s] classmates.

“The thing with this generation is that the National Parenting Programme may not help a lot of parents now. We would still work with them. But if we put this in place, all the ones that are bringing up children in the future, we will be able to guide them.”

However, Weekes maintained that though sometimes it seems like all is lost, institutions such as the church and some of the non-governmental organisations which have various programmes can get all of these programmes to work.

“So long as we are confident in them, I think that these types of interventions will also work,” he added.

Weekes is contending that while parents who benefit from free government-funded pre-natal and post-natal care may be mandated to attend parenting programmes, the same is not automatic at the private level.

“If you are delivering a child free at source, it is mandatory attendance for you. If you have a child, and you deliver that child at one of the private medical facilities, it will not be mandatory; but if a problem developes with that child, you should be mandated to attend parenting. That is the way that you can deal with it,” he suggested in relation to his parenting proposal.

“I [suggested] the National Parenting Programme because we have a number of persons who are accessing free care. If you are delivering all the children and you are not working, for instance…you have that in Barbados too… we have people who come to me and they talk about how hard it is to raise the two [children].”

The chief magistrate said when he asked them if that meant they wouldn’t be having any more children, he becomes concerned that their response is ‘no’.

“You have to go through that with them,” the chief magistrate declared, “because they don’t seem to understand the correlation between having children and feeding them. They don’t seem to understand the correlation between having a child that is very talented and trying to see how you can develop that talent. Or you may have a son who is a good pianist, but if you are not in a position to send the child to piano lessons, you can’t develop that child.

“So, all of those are the reasons we need a national parenting programme, so that we can actually teach adults how to parent; teach them how to deal with situations, because there are situations coming up, they don’t know how to deal
with.”

Weekes  also believes parents need to know how to deal with social media and being the administrator of their children’s accounts. “All those things are why we need a national parenting programme, to give focus to the children,” he said. (EJ)