Families urged to embrace positive parenting skills to enhance cohesiveness

Nyamira, Wednesday, May 17 2023

KNA by Deborah Bochere

Nyamira County coordinator of social development, Elijah Langát has urged family and household heads to embrace positive parenting skills within their homes to help them enhance cohesiveness thus nurture strong and focused communities.

While presiding over celebrations of International Day of Families in Nyamira County, Mr. Langát pointed out that most families have a myriad of unresolved internal and external tussles due to poor parenting and lack of effective communication skills.

“The complexity of resolving family challenges has been compounded by unanticipated emerging issues like new family demographics and global issues whose effects directly or indirectly impact on families,” he said.

“Poverty, hunger, conflict, poor health, illiteracy, various forms of violence, job loss, religious extremism, urbanization, drugs and substance abuse, population increase are just but few of the many challenges in families which require prudent skills in tackling them at the same time ensure these families stay together,” Langat observed.

The county coordinator revealed that children, elder persons, and persons living with disability are the most vulnerable and greatly affected in the family and must therefore be handled with a lot of love and care so that they can have a sense of belonging.

“We want to partner with several organizations to create awareness and sensitize people on their roles in the family they live in and how they can make them the best and comfortable place for members to live and grow despite hardships which are experienced by all families at various levels,” the officer said.

Nyamira Division Assistant County Commissioner, Millicent Gatimu called on families to do their level best in solving conflict matters at the family level before they escalate them to administrators because at the family level, the context and environment of operation is understood by those who live there, administrators should only arbitrate when the situation is out of hand and when clan elders of the affected parties have failed to resolve the matter at hand amicably.

“Land and property inheritance disputes amongst families and society are growing complex by day due to evolving dynamism in family composition and demographics and these tussles keep on taking divergent twists in the process of solving them because individuals within families have personal selfish interests,” Gatimu noted.

I advise family heads to distribute their property to dependents fairly early to reduce infightings and legal battles over land and property when they are long dead,” Gatimu advised.

Mr. Joseph Ogol, an officer at a Non- Governmental organization called Investing in Children and their Societies (ICS) who are supporting a programme of positive parenting in Nyamira to empower families which are at risk of separation confirmed that the programme has helped over 600 families who were selected to benefit from the programme have a drastic improvement in their parental roles and solve their home conflicts reasonably.

Mr. Langát stated that the government’s cash transfer programme is to very vulnerable groups of people within the family who include the elderly, orphans and people living with disability to cushion them effects of abject poverty so that they can be able to access the most basic needs like food, shelter, clothing and medical services.

He appealed to families to shift their parenting approaches from the old ones because the family composition and demographics have changed and modernization, technology and urbanization has changed the way we do our day-to-day errands and the same should be with parenting for the well-being of the family society and country at large.

Courtesy; K.N.A