Latest update January 21st, 2025 3:27 AM
YCG urges students to delay first sexual experience
— as Parent Support programme expands
Premised on the need to ‘work together in harmony to support today’s parents’, Youth Challenge (YCG) has embarked on a Parent Support and Mentorship Programme which according to a Parent Support Coordinator, Adel Lilly, was created in order to provide a medium to strengthen parenting abilities.
According to Lilly the Parent Support programme at YCG was introduced in 2005 with the primary intent of addressing issues that can affect parenting and ways that they could deal with such issues.
YCG’s Adel Lilly
This process, he said, is characterised by interactive sessions hosted by facilitators who present non-judgemental and non-bias information to participating parents. However, he noted that prospective parents are also encouraged to be a part of the programme.
“Groups would normally go to various communities and have conferences and educational sessions with parents, young adults and even teenagers dealing with the challenges of parenthood,” Lilly disclosed.
At the moment, he revealed that YCG has Region Three has its main target area and has been working with a number of schools by holding parenting sessions. And the main focus right now, he said, is to look at how the generation gap between children and parents can impact the parenting process. “We are showing parents and teenagers that they need to bridge the gap. They can do this by starting with discussions in the home about things that affect them…things that are different now when compared to the past.”
According to Lilly, the YCG parent support programme is working along with an in-school prevention programme. The in-school prevention programme, he said, is one where YCG engages third form students in order to appeal to them to delay their first sexual experience. It has been discovered, Lilly noted that although empowering students with the requisite knowledge is essential, their parents also need to play a major part if the desired result is to be fully realised. It is for this very reason he noted that parents have been recognised as a crucial target as well. “The parents have been coming out…At the in-school programme we have a number of parents that have shown a keen interest. They are eager to be a part of discussions that we have and they always have questions of how they could better handle their parenting roles.”
Lilly, during an interview with this newspaper revealed plans to expand the initiative by forming different parent support groups in a number of communities. “If we go to a particular community we just don’t stop there. We form a parent support group where parents can meet on their own maybe with a respected person in the society such as a pastor, or pandit, and they can have their individual sessions.”
And there have been similar programmes that have been extended to other communities, including Sophia in Georgetown, Golden Grove on the East of Demerara, and plans are apace to head to Grove on the East Bank of Demerara, Lilly revealed.
But though the programme has been yielding noticeable success, it has not been without some challenges. According to Lilly, there have been instances when parents have indicated that such a programme is not needful. He recalled venturing to a particular school where the issue of sex was being discussed and some parents had voiced some concerns. “Some parents just didn’t feel the need to have this discussion about sex…,” Lilly lamented.
In order to overcome this challenge, he noted that intense efforts are being made to enlighten parents of the pressures that children are made to endure at schools in a quest to help them better understand the usefulness of the parent support and in-school prevention programmes, hence the need to emphasise the impact of the generation gap.
Meanwhile, YCG has also embarked on another programme to recruit mentors who could lend to the effort of offering good guidance to parents. According to Lilly, efforts will be made to solicit the support of male figures in particular, adding that as in any other programme at YCG, women usually dominate. “We have found that even when we go out into the various communities we are having a mere two or three fathers coming out to our sessions.” As such, Lilly noted that YCG is appealing to males to be more supportive.
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