‘GET MORE INVOLVED’

Parents need to be more involved in their children’s lives.

This comment came from Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, Senator Harcourt Husbands, during the Barbados National Council of Parent-Teacher Associations Inc.’s (BNCPTA) first official awards ceremony that was held at the Samuel Jackman Prescod Polytechnic on Saturday night.

Senator Husbands said that in the area of education, and of rearing children, parents must be at the centre of their children’s lives. It may seem like an obvious statement, but he explained that in the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, the department that deals with delinquency and other troubled areas of children, revealed to him that whenever they need to deal with challenges facing children in the school system, it appears that the root of the problem is the lack of involvement parents have in their child’s life.

Equating his success to the active roles his parents played in his life, the Senator believes that parents are too absent from the lives of their children and expressed that this is something that needs to change. He explained that there are other factors that affect the lives of children, such as school or delinquent teachers, but expressed that these factors were ones that children were able to recover from. However, the absence of good parenting is hard for a child to get over.

“We as parents are called to perform these duties. Anything the Government does, or the church does, or a parliamentary representative does is extra, but that cannot be the first point of reference in the rearing of your children,” he said.

Senator Husbands went on to say that it offends him when parents blame things such as the school, church or government for the way their child behaves, and believes that they need to take the responsibility for their own actions when it came to raising their children.

Acknowledging the fact that the parents present at the awards ceremony were ambassadors and great examples of people that worked hard and were active in their child’s lives, he tasked them with the responsibility of going out into the public to encourage and remind other parents of the important role they have to play in the lives of their children.