Parenting education is the focus of my volunteer activity. I call it the passion of my third age!
My motivation to pursue this work was the help I received from other parents when my sons were teenagers. It was, quite simply, transformative. I learned how to be both more responsive and more responsible as a parent and I founded Parents Forum to pass on the lessons I had learned.
Some days I have the feeling I am ’tilting at windmills’ in addressing the stigma attached to parenting education. Many people are confident they are doing just fine with their kids until, one day they realize that they aren’t and that either they or their children, legitimately, need professional help.
The idea behind Parents Forum is that parents can help each other stay on a good path in their child-rearing, notice problems and address them when they are small, and possibly make professional help unnecessary.
Another use of our parent peer support model is as aftercare for parents who have had professional help and want to maintain its benefits.
Many people in schools and agencies serving parents see parenting programs primarily as teaching concepts and developing skills. They pay little attention to helping parents become more socially and emotionally aware. That element is the focus of Parents Forum: we see emotional awareness in each family member as the cornerstone of a happy home.
During the 20-plus years since I founded Parents Forum, workshop participants frequently attest to the program’s powerful impact. After a Family Support America conference in Chicago, a participant said the workshop gave me information I can use immediately, at home and everywhere. Inmates who took the workshop at a men’s medium security prison wrote, “This offered new insights on things I ’thought’ I knew.”
The Parents Forum peer support approach is captured in our tagline – come share your strength. We believe that every parent has something to teach and something to learn. The mission of Parents Forum is to foster caring, honest, respectful communications in families.
None of us was a perfect child and no one is a perfect parent. Our lives would be very boring if so! A grandmother who attended our “How To Tell Somebody Something They’d Rather Not Hear” mini-workshop (offered at the craft store where I stock shelves one day a week) told us, “If more people felt safe enough to assert themselves in a peaceful way, there would be less anxiety, anger and oppression in families and among friends and coworkers. What a wonderful world that would be!”
Older workers want the same things that younger workers want: rewards for what we do and recognition for who we are and for the experience we have. We may need co-workers to speak more slowly or slightly louder. (I do!) We may feel overwhelmed, at first, by the tsunami of technological advances in the workplace and at home, but we can learn to use and benefit from them.